


Our Deepest Secrets

by In_agony_and_ecstasy



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Domestic, Coming of Age, Destiny, Fate, First Love, First Time, Gender Dysphoria, Insecurity, M/M, Pre transition!Jean, Religion, Role Models, Secrets, Self-Acceptance, Self-Discovery, Trans Male Character, gender euphoria, just suspend your belief and roll with it, love at first sight AU, post transition!Eren, the one where they're both trans, writing students
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2018-03-29 19:47:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 49,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3908368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/In_agony_and_ecstasy/pseuds/In_agony_and_ecstasy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Eren's life he has struggled to understand why he is the way he is. He prays and he goes to church, and God never answers him. When Eren's dad dies, Eren makes the decision to ignore all of his beliefs - including the belief that God doesn't make mistakes - and move away so that he can go to school and transition without his mother's judgment on top of God's. </p><p>Living as his true self was his only intention when moving away, but then he sees a girl that makes him wonder if moving away and transitioning and meeting her was part of the plan all along.</p><p>When he disovers Jeanice's deepest secret - that Jeanice is actually Jean, and he desperately needs Eren's help - he doesn't question his destiny any further.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I want to reassure everyone that this fic doesn't depict religion negatively! Eren is religious, and sometimes he's a little bit scornful of God and religion, but overall it won't actually be a major theme and the moments that religion is mentioned won't be harmful to either Jean's or Eren's mental health. If anything, this fic is trying to explore Eren's life as both a religious man and a trans man, since so many people think that trans people can't be religious or shouldn't be. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!

When I was about four years old, I found out I was a girl. I didn’t realize then that finding out your gender wasn’t something that happened to everybody. Most kids just knew. And I thought I did too, but I was wrong. I wasn’t just a boy with a mom who dressed him in pink, frilly dresses. I wasn’t just a boy with a girl’s name. Or a boy with long hair, or a boy that had thoughtless grandparents who bought him Barbies every Christmas.

I was a girl, apparently. 

By the time I started school, I had learned how to be one. This too, wasn’t something the other kids had to do. All the other girls knew innately they were supposed to draw hearts, and play house and only play on the monkey bars or swings during recess because anything that involved grass or pavement was a boy thing. They actually liked dressing up in wigs and glittery, itchy, Velcro-ish, princess dresses. 

As I got older I was weighed down each day by the weight of what a girl was supposed to act like. Even more than my parents, I went to church and prayed. I wasn’t sure what drove me to do it, because nothing ever came of it, but still I went. My parents were those religious people who went to church on Sunday because they feared hell, or because they somehow thought it absolved them of their fuckeduppedness. But I didn’t. I went because I knew there had to be a reason God made me the way I was, and I couldn’t stand waiting years and years to figure it out. 

Years later, I discovered what I was on the internet in different chat rooms with complete strangers. Or at least, I discovered that there were others like me and they had all adopted a term to describe the feeling I had inside me that I was a man. I wasn’t ready to adopt that label yet. It didn’t feel right. I’d heard too many times in my life that God didn’t make mistakes, and I believed it. 

But then something happened that forced me to reevaluate everything in my life that made me believe in God. My dad died. He died crossing the street on his way to pick up some cigarettes. He could have gone the next morning, or earlier that day, or quit a few days earlier like he had threatened to do or could have smoked one or two less in the last week. He could have never left the house to go grab cigarettes at all, but he did. Then he crossed the street, and a woman hit him in her car. This woman that hit him in her car could have gotten out of work ten minutes earlier or later, could have taken a route with less traffic home, could have stopped at a different place on her way, could have filled her tank earlier that day so she didn’t need to go to a gas station or ran out of gas earlier and stalled on the streets. But she didn’t. She hit my dad in her car.

Now, the woman could have called 911 two minutes earlier, or the 911 operator could have said ten less words, or the ambulance could have driven five miles per an hour faster, or the paramedics in the ambulance could have had five more years of experience under their belts. But none of those people did, and my dad died before he even got to the hospital.

He never even knew me. The real me. The one I had fought so hard all my life to keep hidden from him. My dad died without ever knowing he had a son.

And the worst part was, it was better that way. He wouldn’t have wanted to know.

It was at the funeral that I really started to think about everything I had believed in without ever even doubting. I had assumed that God had a plan for me, that I had some sort of destiny. Fate had played a role in my life from the beginning, hadn’t it? I had been born with brown skin and Mexican blood to a mother who was in no position to take care of me. I had been born with a certain body part and had been declared a certain gender with a specific letter. I had been adopted by my mom and dad who brought me to church on Sundays and made sure I stayed in school. 

And I had been born with this feeling in my gut that something had gotten mixed up. Like my body was still trying to untangle it but with age and puberty and everyone around me the knot kept getting tighter and tighter. Eventually, all that I could do was cut it.

And I did.

When I was eighteen I moved out of the house. My mom knew only that I was going to school, not that I was going to therapy. Not that I was starting to take testosterone injections. And several months later, she wouldn’t know that I was scheduling my double-mastectomy or legally changing my name. God and I weren’t on such great terms during that time, but sometimes at night – early morning actually, after hours of being unable to sleep – I’d pray. 

I’d ask Him why He killed my dad. I’d ask Him if He ever did something just because He could, if fucking with people’s lives was His way of avoiding boredom. I’d ask Him if this wasn’t part of His plan for me after all. 

Eventually I compromised. You took my dad, so I’m becoming a man. We’re even. 

But that was when I was eighteen and still bothered keeping in touch with Him at all. 

Only now, at twenty one years old, was I starting to think about God, and destiny, and fate and whether or not life meant anything or if we were all just wandering around trying to stamp the earth in some way before we died so that hundreds of years from now whatever life was still around could say _Look, this person existed, and he was trans._

I was in the hallway outside my basic fiction studio class on the first day of my junior year in college. The class wasn’t starting for another fifteen minutes, and the door was still locked because the teacher hadn’t arrived yet. A few other students had arrived early. We were all loitering in the hall, some leaning against the walls, others on benches, and a couple sitting like I was. 

One of them sat right across from me. She sat cross-legged with her laptop perched on her knees. Her fingers were tapping away on the keyboard almost drowning out the sounds of nearby chatter. Her feet were tapping too, and the hems of the capris she wore rode up on her legs. She had fuzzy ankles. Not fuzzy ankles like she hadn’t gotten around to shaving in a few days, but fuzzy ankles like mine. I smiled. Her headphones snaked up under her long blond hair. Her eyebrows knitted together in concentration. She bit her bottom lip. Every few seconds her hazel eyes flitted up to glance at the clock on the wall, which turned my smile into a grin, because her screen must have had a digital clock on it. 

Every once in a while I got to experience a deeply intimate moment between someone and themselves in plain day. I supposed everyone did, but I didn’t know if anyone paid attention to it like I did. Maybe it was the whole I’m-a-writer-thing, I didn’t know. 

But right now, I realized this was one of those moments. This girl was existing in this world as if she were the only one here. She was so lost in her thoughts – whatever she was typing about on her laptop – that she had forgotten the world around her. She was not changing her behavior to be appropriate for school. She was not wearing a mask to hide how she felt about surrounding students. She wasn’t acting. I knew in my heart that this was exactly the person she was when no one else was around. She existed solely for herself, being who she was without considering what others were seeing. And I was seeing her the way God saw everyone all the time. That was a rare, and beautiful phenomenon that I cherished like I did breath. 

I had this theory, about fate and destiny and what-was-meant-to-be and he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not-shit and all that other cosmic, intangible _stuff_ , that love wasn’t as complicated as anyone liked to think. I knew in my soul that within a minute of meeting another human being I knew everything I needed to know about them. Of course I knew that humans were much more complicated than anything that could fit into a minute. But within in a minute, there was an energy, a spark, a sort of understanding on a cellular level between me and the person I just met that we had something worth spending more time on than one minute…or we didn’t. It was like that. Sometimes it was hate at first sight. Oh yes, I believed in hate at first sight. 

And so it only made sense that if I could know within a minute that if I had to nominate a person on earth to die next it wouldn’t bother me that much to choose that one specific person, certainly then, I should believe in love at first sight too.

Not in the Romeo-and-Juliette way. Not like the hypnotizing-get-married-in-secret-after-three-days-or-whatever-and-die-for-each-other way. But in the you-know-what?-there-is-something-about-you-that-I-would-never-get-sick-of-and-I’d-probably-actually-only-love-more-and-more-and-always-want-to-be-around-for-as-long-as-I-live kind of way. 

Because all love was, when it came right down to it, was this:

Love happens when you can face the rest of your life knowing there will never be a moment when you are happier alone than with that person. 

That was all it took. Both simple, and extraordinarily complex. Not even I knew everything that would happen in my life, all the experiences I would have to confront that would reshape my mind and my beliefs and my purpose. Only God knew all that. 

But it didn’t matter, because I could not fathom any future that I would ever mind waking up knowing that she was in my life.

I was about to introduce myself. Say hi. Ask her what she was typing. But then the sound of high-heels clacking against the tiling approached and keys jangled and a doorknob clicked and students herded into the class and so did she. 

After we all shuffled around the desks and found a place to sit, my teacher introduced herself. I didn’t pay much attention to her as she discussed the syllabus, our assignments for the year and the grading rubric. Instead I looked at the desks. They were organized in a circle like writing classes often were, and like most writing classes there weren’t many students. Fifteen at most. Throughout the year a few would drop out and a few others would just skip a lot. Somewhere during the time that I was trying to decide who would stick around and who was probably a good writer based on literally nothing at all, I realized that the girl I was low-key in love with had sat directly across from me on the other side of the room. 

She leaned back far in her chair with her arms crossed and her legs stretching out underneath the table. Her gaze focused on the teacher, in a detached sort of way, like her head had ended up looking that way by chance and not because she actually cared to pay attention. 

Our teacher stood and clapped her hands. “Okay! Now that we’ve covered all that boring stuff, we’re gonna move on to our first assignment!”

A couple of kids groaned and glanced at the door like they might make their escape. Most of them just blinked and exhaled slowly because they were juniors like me or seniors and by now they knew better than to expect a teacher to be merciful. The love of my life looked like a garbage truck could plow through the window and she might not notice.

The teacher trotted around the desks sticking a Post-it note to the edge of each one while explaining what we were going to do. “I want each of you to write down your deepest secret. One only you know, or that very few people know. One you wouldn’t want strangers to know. Don’t write your name on it.”

Like me, most kids just picked up the damn Post-it note and wrote down their deepest secret. Really, if they wanted to, they could lie. Who would know? 

I didn’t lie. I wrote:

I’m a trans man.

Then I stuck my Post-it note on the desk again and waited for my teacher to continue. 

In that time, I watched the love of my life pick up her Post-it note and stroke it with her thumb like she might my cheekbone on a Saturday morning we’d both slept in too late. Her eyebrows knitted like they had in the hall and her shoulders hunched up like someone had stuffed something down the back of her shirt or maybe like one of the clasps on her bra had come undone. I didn’t know, but she looked like something inside of her was being tugged by a string that lead out the door. She wasn’t going to lie on that paper, I knew, and there was something she _definitely_ had never said out loud before. She finally wrote down whatever it was.

Oh, if only I could be that Post-it note. 

When everyone had written their deepest secret down, the teacher instructed us to close our eyes and cover our heads. We did. She walked around the room, her shoes brushing across the carpeting as she got closer and closer to me, one by one collecting our secrets. I wondered if she wasn’t looking at whose was whose. It didn’t matter for me; I had emailed her before school even started to double-check that the school had finally gotten my new name right. They hadn’t of course, so I had to send another email explaining to her what my name was and why.

She told us to lift up our heads, and all our secrets were on display stuck to the whiteboard behind her. None of them had names, only handwriting to mark any signature and they were all clustered in the center. 

“Each of you will get one that is not your own,” she explained, “And you will write a story from that person’s perspective. We’ll read them in class next Monday.”

“Are we supposed to find out whose secret it is?” someone asked. 

Hazel eyes widened across from me, pupils narrowing, as she whipped her head toward the whiteboard to eye her Post-it.

“No, no one is sharing their secrets. No one is going to know whose Post-it note is whose. It’s just a writing exercise.”

A few kids nodded, others looked relieved, and the girl looked like she had been brought back from the dead. I was thankful to God on her behalf.

The teacher started gathering up the Post-it notes. She looked like she was about to read them out loud, but then her phone rang. She sighed.

“You,” she said, pointing at me, “Could you pass these out? Give someone else yours.”

She handed me the crumpled up pile of notes, and I began sorting through them.

Secret number 1) I cheated on my girlfriend.  
Secret number 2) I hit someone’s parked car and drove away.  
Secret number 3) I stole five hundred dollars from my aunt.

I kept sorting through them. At that point, I wasn’t looking for my own, I was looking for one that would stimulate the synapses in my head enough to write about. Most of them, despite being pretty big secrets in real life, would be boring ones to write about. 

Secret number 6) I fake every orgasm.  
Secret number 7) I told my boyfriend that my baby is his. 

As I carded through the notes, I felt like I had the power of God in my hands. At the same time I felt the urge to set these notes on fire. This was theirs to know, after all. 

While I debated if I might go to hell while searching through these notes, I found the one I wanted. My fingers clutched so tightly onto it that my nail tore it.

Secret number 11) I feel like I’m a man on the inside. 

My head jerked up to scan the class. Some of them had noticed me judging their secrets. The teacher hadn’t, she was still chatting on the phone with what sounded like another teacher having a printer crisis in another part of the building.

I looked for the signs. Adam’s apples? Check. Beards or stubble? Check. Size ten shoes or up? Check. 

All the men in the room that I could tell were probably born with dicks.

Then I looked at the note again and realized…

I hadn’t said I “feel” like a man on the _inside_ since I still thought I was a woman on the _outside_. 

I looked over the class again. There was no way to tell which one of the women wasn’t actually a woman. All of them wore something feminine, a skirt or blouse or headband or makeup or whatever it was…but so had I up until my dad died. That didn’t mean anything. My fingers carded through the other Post-it notes still trying to find my own, and I did it as slowly as possible deciding that it couldn’t be a coincidence that my teacher had chosen me to pass out the Post-it notes. It was up to me to help the other man in the room like myself. He needed me, and more importantly I couldn’t stand the thought of someone else getting this man’s Post-it note. I could handle what hate and hurt came my way from ignorant strangers, but this man still wasn’t past the stage when he hated and hurt himself.

There were seven women in the room. Five wore make up. Three sat with their legs crossed. Two wore a wedding band. One was pregnant. I was nearly positive the pregnant married one wasn’t him. The thought of becoming pregnant literally gave me nightmares sometimes, and honestly even being married while in the closet would be so intolerable I couldn’t imagine comfortably sitting in this room and casually writing my secret down on a paper that others would see before the person I married even did. I crossed them off my mental list. I decided that leg-crossing was somehow an indicator that they weren’t trans too. Obviously trans men could cross their legs…but even when “I was a girl” (sounded funny in my head now) I never picked up on those mannerisms that society had deemed feminine. I never did them without thinking. 

And I _especially_ never wore makeup. Once in a while my mom had done my makeup for a wedding or something, and she had to damn near pry my arms away from my face to put that crap on my eyelids. Then I’d end up messing it up the whole day every time I itched my face or rubbed it or tried to hide it from people looking at me. But even that didn’t mean much…that was just me, not all trans men. 

Just when I thought there would be no way to distinguish him I remembered her. 

Oh my God. How had I already forgotten the love of my life? 

My gaze wondered over to her and thought really hard about everything I had observed about her so far. The way she sat. The unapologetic expressions she wore. Her fuzzy ankles. More than anything, the terror in her eyes when she thought for a moment someone might learn her secret. 

I’d seen all the secrets in the pile. I could think of no secret that would be more horrifying for strangers to find out than secretly being trans. All the secrets were something that made a person look bad, but the most that would happen to the person if a stranger found out would be receiving a look with a judgmental arched eyebrow and a _tsk, tsk_. 

But being trans, people were murdered for that. 

I sent a prayer to God that I had guessed right. That the love of my life originally thought to be a woman was actually the trans man, and I had unwittingly bumped into my eyebrow-knitted, blond destiny today. 

I placed my Post-it note across from him. He barely glanced at it, until he realized I wasn’t stepping away just yet. He looked at me, then at the Post-it note. He squinted. I could tell that whether he actually was trans or not, he wasn’t familiar with the term. But something must have sunk in because he lurched forward in his seat and his jaw dropped. He looked up at me again, and his eyebrows quirked upward. I answered his silent questions by nodding. Yes, it’s my Post-it note. Yes, that’s what it’s called. Yes, I’m just like you.

I held up his torn Post-it note, and his eyes followed my hand as I tucked it into my pocket.

“Are you gonna pass those out _today_?” the person next to him asked, and I strode around the room pressing a secret onto the desk of every other student. Once I sat down, his eyes flicked toward me. I smiled at him, trying to reassure him. He didn’t return it, but I didn’t blame him. He still had that terror in his pupils and hunch in his shoulders. His knuckles tapped against the desk.

A couple minutes later the teacher got off her phone. She went over a few cursory details regarding our assignment. It was to be five pages long. 12 font, Times New Roman. Page number had to be in the upper right corner. Stories had to have titles. Anything written with dialogue punctuated improperly wouldn’t be accepted. If we were absent we could email it to her, but we’d miss peer-editing. The usual writing class debrief. 

Then she told us she would see us next week, and let us out an hour early. 

The students stood, stuffing notebooks and textbooks into their backpacks and hitching purses over their shoulders as they shuffled toward the door. The teacher was busy looking over the attendance sheet. I collected my things before I strode past the love of my life. I didn’t want to confront him, and make him uncomfortable, so I left the classroom and decided to wait outside the door. That way he could walk past me if he wanted to.

He didn’t. With my Post-it note still pinched between his thumb and knuckles, he stepped toward me in the hall. Since we were surrounded by students passing and talking on their phones or to each other, if we spoke quietly no one would pay any attention to us.

He glanced away from me, staring at the brick wall right behind me as if he could drill a hole into it with his eyes. “You aren’t going to…to tell anyone are you?”

I shook my head. “No way in hell.”

“This doesn’t mean we’re – I don’t even know if I’m –” He cut himself off, and glanced at my note again. His hair fell in front of his face, and I wished I could tuck it behind his ears. The ends of it reached his ribs. His eyes met mine again. The way they pinched at the corners, the way his brows furrowed and he clenched his jaw, it was hard to believe anyone looked at him and thought he was a girl. “I don’t even know if I’m like you.”

“I didn’t say you were,” I said, trying not to be defensive. If someone had done this to me three years ago, I probably would have acted the same way. Hell, I might have been worse. 

“But you’re a…? I mean you…” he said, gripping on to his arm like he was shielding himself as he tried to find the words. I fought a smile. He might not have known what the word trans meant or whether or not he was like me, but he knew better than to say that I “used to be a girl”.

“I was assigned female at birth,” I said. 

His eyes widened and his eyes flitted toward a nearby group of art students wearing aprons and holding paint brushes too big for their canvases. They crouched on newspapers and spread plastic as they painted quick hash marks across the stiff canvas fabric. He turned his head to face me again.

“But you’re a man,” he said.

“I am.”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Eren.” He squinted at me for a second, probably trying to figure out if that was my birth name or not. If he was, he decided not to ask. “What’s yours?” 

“Jeanice.” His grip tightened on his arm. His knuckles turned white as they tightened on my note. 

“Is that what you want to be called?”

He hesitated, but shook his head. “It’s what everyone calls me.”

“I’m not going to call you that.”

He sighed, clenching his jaw again. “Are you going to call me by my last name then?”

I shrugged. “Is that what you want? I’ll call you whatever you want.”

He shook his head. His hands shifted to clutch on to his backpack straps. He looked away from me again, down the hall, eyeing everyone near us. No one was paying any attention, but I could understand the paranoia. I didn’t fear anymore that anyone would look at me and suspect. Ever since growing facial hair, even when I was clean shaven no one questioned me. My face always had stubble, or at the very least just wasn’t smooth or soft enough to be a woman’s according to popular opinion. But he wasn’t used to this, and I knew how loud my words must have been to him. I could remember days that I had researched “I feel like a man on the inside”, and somehow I had been certain that the words on the site were scrolling in front of my mom’s eyes too, even when she was in a completely different room. 

“Whatever,” he said, tucking his hands into his jean pockets. “Just call me…call me Jean.”

I smiled. As he said these words, his stammering, his inability to look me in the eyes, and the way he tried to say “whatever” like it didn’t matter told me he didn’t come up with that just now. He’d been trying out the taste of that name on his tongue for a long time. 

“Jean,” I repeated, trying out the soft ‘J’ as well. 

“I mean,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck and blushing in a way that kind of made my heart sing, “that’s the guy version, right?”

“I guess. I wouldn’t really know.”

He nodded. “Jean, then.” 

We were both quiet for a moment. I was trying to figure out a way to ask him out without _asking him out_. Of course I’d love to take him on a date, but it was too early for that and in any case I knew he’d turn me down. I didn’t even know if he liked men. But just the same, I wanted to talk to him some more. I wanted to introduce him to my world, the post-transition world and everything it could offer him all at once. I wanted me to be the person that gave him everything that I knew he had been craving since he was a kid. 

He looked like he was thinking about something else. A crease between his eyebrows deepened as his eyebrows stitched together. “You aren’t going to – just, how are you going to write the story?’ 

“Haven’t thought about it yet,” I lied. 

“Just don’t – I don’t even know you, okay. Don’t act like you know me. Just because you’re – doesn’t mean we –”

“How about,” I started, cutting him off, “you just tell me how you want it to be written?”

“But it’s due next class.”

“Give me my Post-it.” I gestured toward the orange slip of paper still pinched between his knuckles. It was crinkled and torn now. 

He handed it to me. I held it in one hand while the other reached around behind me to slide my backpack off. It thudded against the tile floor and I unzipped one of its pockets to pull out a pen. I scribbled my phone number across the orange paper under my confession. Then I handed it back to him as I stood back up and slid the straps over my shoulders again.

His eyes narrowed at it, and then at me. “You want me to call you?”

“Or text me,” I replied. “Whatever works. That way I can write the story how you want it.”

He bit his lip, but nodded. He swiveled on his feet to step away, but I tugged on his sleeve.

He glared at my hand, but I didn’t let go just yet.

“Hey, if you – it doesn’t have to be just about writing, okay? If you have any other questions about – about your situation, you can just ask.”

Jean didn’t respond. He jerked his arm once and my hand released him. Then he strode away.

At first I thought I had taken it a step too far; he probably wouldn’t call me. But then he looked over his shoulder at me, and for the second time since first laying eyes on him, he wasn’t faking any emotion or trying to hide. And he looked –

He looked scared, and hurt, and broken, and betrayed, and hostile and –

And hopeful and grateful and relieved.

I didn’t know a face could carry so many expressions as his at once. I smiled again so he would know that he really could text me. He didn’t have to feel all those things. Hope was enough. Maybe some trust too.

His head turned to face the exit. And as he walked away from me, I watched him stroke the handwriting on my Post-it note with his thumb, cradling my deepest secret in his palm.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter Eren is a nervous wreck, shows Jean more of his secrets, and watches Jean begin to discover himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you reading No More Wrongs to Write, I haven't forgotten it! I'm having a bit of writer's block but it is now at the top of my list! It will update before anything else. Thanks for understanding.

We didn’t speak the first day after class. I tried telling myself that the reason he didn’t text me was because he wasn’t working on the assignment yet. We had a week between classes. Of course he wasn’t working on it yet. Still, I wondered if he was at home fighting the urge to ask me questions about the type of men we were, or if he was refusing to even text me about the assignment because I had been too invasive the day before. Either idea worried me. If he didn’t want my help, I wouldn’t give it to him, but I’d never stop wondering if he’d found a way to be himself. 

Despite all this, I decided to start writing his story. I had homework for other classes that was due earlier, but I didn’t care. Those other classes were chores, but writing was like a vital function. 

Like going to the bathroom, or eating, or breathing, or sleeping, it was something I had to do every day and often did without thinking about. Since I was little even, I wrote. I had stacks of diaries written in college bound notebooks. During middle school, along with the tragic, awkward process of “becoming a woman” and dying a bit with each period, I had another embarrassing, dramatic streak of poetry. I was awful at writing poetry just like I was awful at being a “young lady,” but it got me through the days. By high school, I was experimenting with fiction the same way I was experimenting with sports bras that were too tight and trying to lose enough weight so that my periods would no longer come.

In my one bedroom apartment, I sat at my desk with my fingertips on the keyboard waiting for the words to rush through my veins. I wrote five sentences, then deleted three of them. I wrote eight more, but deleted the first two. I wrote an entire page, went through and deleted every adverb and every sentence that started with “There was.” Once that was done, I went through and counted how many times I started a sentence with “I” and decided I was sick of every word. So I backspaced one letter at a time until the page was empty. 

It was pointless. I didn’t know him. If I had gotten someone else’s secret, I would have made something up. That was what we were supposed to do anyway. This wasn’t a nonfiction course. We weren’t taking the course to write down actual events. But this story was about him, and somehow I knew that no story I could make up would ever compare to the memories hidden in his mind. I needed to know what his life was like. For now, I let myself pretend the only reason I wanted to know this was so that I could write a convincing story and get a good grade. 

I went to bed without a word saved.

…

The next day I shuffled through my classes like a drone, waiting for the time to make my escape and head home. By five pm, he still hadn’t text me and the muscles in my back tightened with each passing minute. My phone was always in sight. It sat right beside my keyboard. I often glanced at it. More than once I checked it even though I knew I would have seen it light up or heard it buzz against the wood top of my desk. 

Tonight, I didn’t try to write for our class. I focused on other short stories I had sitting on my computer. Nothing substantial came of it. Not being able to write easily was almost as frustrating as not writing. After several attempts I gave up again and completed the homework that was due for other classes. 

At nine pm, I killed some time in the shower. The water was cold before I got out. Once the showerhead quit dripping and I turned off the ceiling fan, I heard it. The vibration of my phone against my desk. It only lasted a second but I darted out of my bathroom and snatched it up.

I didn’t recognize the number, so I knew it was him. He texted, **Sorry it’s late.**

**Is this Jean?** , I sent back, although I knew it was. 

**Yeah.**

I saved his number to my contacts. Then I typed on the keypad, **What’s up?**

I wondered if that sounded too casual, too corny, too forced or anything else. It felt unnatural, but what would have been better? As much as I wanted to ask him to, I didn’t think he’d be willing to text me his entire life story. 

My phone buzzed. **Have you started writing yet?** , he sent. 

**No. I don’t know what to write yet** , I replied. 

The assignment was only five pages. In five pages, I could write a story that spanned five years or I could write a story that would span five minutes. I was overthinking it all, as if he actually had hired me to write his life story for him. I wished the assignment had been longer. I wished this assignment wasn’t due until the last day of class, so I had an excuse to talk to him the entire semester. In less than a week, I had to learn everything there was to know about this man _and_ convince him to fall in love with me. 

**Me neither.**

I was about to respond to him when the little animated ellipses popped up on my screen and began hopping. He would type for over a minute, and then the ellipses would drop. For a whole five seconds God and I were both certain that he would never talk to me again. Then he would start typing once more. A gray speech bubble bloated on the screen and my phone vibrated in my hand. 

**I have no idea what it’s like to be you. I don’t know how to write from your perspective.**

I knew he didn’t mean to make his text emotional. He was still trying to protect himself, shield behind indifference and the formalities of writing a five page story. But it didn’t matter, I could feel his pain because it was in my bones too. His words made something ache inside of me, thinking about the days when I would walk through the hallways at my high school, seeing other boys with flat chests and exposed hairy legs and just _longing_ for something I had never known. What they had was something that I had missed, so dearly for as long as I could remember, like an online, life-long, best friend that I had never met in person and for a while, thought I never would. Now my chest felt hallow, and no matter how deeply I reached into it I couldn’t find anything there. I had to help him.

 **Want to meet after school tomorrow?**

It took me a full thirty seconds to gain the courage to send it to him, but I did. I reminded myself that he texted me first, he must have wanted to talk to me. He must be able to tolerate me, at the very least. The ellipses sprung up again and I bit my lip waiting for his response. My fingers tapped against the back of my phone case.

**To talk about the assignment?**

What else did he think I meant? **Yeah.**

It took him over a minute to reply. I started pacing my room, tapping my fingers against my thigh and biting on my lip until skin peeled. I tried not to think about how long it had been since I had hung out with someone. I didn’t have any friends, at least not at this school. My only true friends were my sister, who I hadn’t spoken to in months, and my friend Armin from high school, who hadn’t seen me since I had hair down to the small of my back. We spoke, but it wasn’t like it used to be. Neither of them knew I was a completely different person than when they last saw me. Or at least, I _looked_ like a completely different person. Who I was hadn’t changed. 

Most of this was on purpose. I didn’t need friends. The risk of someone finding out I was trans was too high. 

But sometimes at night, I fantasized about feeling someone’s fingertips against me. Pressed into my back as they greeted me walking up the steps, hugging me on my way out, shaking my hand. Sometimes I just thought about what it would be like to say my thoughts out loud again. To watch a movie and hear someone else breathing nearby. I was lonely. Most days I could lie to myself, and pretend that having no friends at all was better than having friends that would never truly know me.

But Jean did know me, and I couldn’t lie about my loneliness now. He was the only person in my life that knew my secret other than God. He left me without an excuse.

Two minutes had passed. I had just clasped my hands together with my phone in between them to pray, when my phone buzzed.

**Where?**

I told him to meet me in the arts and sciences building outside the writing center shortly after my shift working there would end. From seven tomorrow morning to noon I would be in the writing center editing the papers, stories, and personal writing of students that had made appointments. Either that or, since it was still so early in the year and students didn’t have a lot of homework yet, sitting on my ass with the other writing consultants playing Sudoku and hang-man. 

**I’ll be there.**

I reread the words a number of times in case they vanished. They didn’t, and I grinned. It wasn’t a date. It wasn’t even two men meeting on friendly terms because they wanted to see each other. It was for homework, which was the worst kind of forced human interaction outside of coworkers and ordering pizza. But it was with him, the love of my life if I recalled, and I didn’t give a shit.

I fell asleep that night with my phone in my hand and a smile on my face. 

… 

Ten minutes before my shift was supposed to end, my boss let me out early. All I had done was sit behind the desk answering the phone and speaking with students inquiring about our hours and whether or not they could make Saturday appointments. Three times I was caught using the office computer to write, and twice I was caught using one of my notebooks to. By now, my boss must have figured I wasn’t doing much but taking up space, so he let me go. I was out the door before he finished his sentence. 

Outside of the writing center, I headed toward a lobby that was cluttered with a few tables and surrounded by vending machines, computers, a printer, and two microwaves. This was the place I was supposed to meet Jean. A clock hung on the wall above one of the vending machines, and my eyes zoomed in on it as I skidded a chair out from underneath a table and sat down. I was the only one in the room. My feet tapped against the floor and my knuckles knocked against the tabletop. For six everlasting minutes I waited for it to strike noon, and by the time it was twelve-o-four I was certain time was a social construct and never existed at all and neither did the universe and I made Jean up in a desperate attempt to overcome loneliness. 

But he existed, and his Converse shoes thudded along the tile floor around the wall divider at twelve-o-six. Today he wore gray sweatpants a size too big for him, and a plain, lavender V-neck. His hair was pulled back into a limp pony-tail. Strands of it strung out around his ears and chin. Wisps of hair glinted in the incandescent light. It was tangled, uncombed since this morning. His eyelids were the same color of his shirt, not from eyeshadow but from being pale and tired. His cheeks were sallow. I couldn’t remember if he looked like this last time I saw him. He looked tired. I wondered if he had trouble sleeping at night like I used to.

He tugged the chair across from me out from under the table and sat down. His shoulders were hunched, his fingers laced, and his mouth frowning. 

“Hey,” I mumbled. 

“Hey,” he replied. “You still haven’t started?”

I shook my head. His features softened. I could tell he was the slightest bit relieved. “I still don’t know what you want me to write about.”

Rubbing the back of his neck, he winced. “I don’t even know what there is to write about. It’s not much of a secret.”

No, Jean, I thought. It was _the_ secret. It was _everything_. This secret was _the world_. He just didn’t know it yet. 

“Why did you pick it then?” 

His hazel eyes drifted, as if he couldn’t face his memories. “Because…because it’s the only secret I have that I’ve never told anyone. I’m not – I’m a shit liar. And I actually really hate lying and the pretenses of meeting someone and, like, small talk and pretty much anything that – I can’t stand when people aren’t themselves. So I’ve always been…tried to be, honest. Except this – this one thing, I guess.” 

“Doesn’t that mean you’ve never been yourself around anyone before?” 

Jean paused, and exhaled. For a moment his eyes looked like they were made of glass, and I had just cracked them. “I didn’t think so until I realized it wasn’t something I just made up. Until I met you. Now...now, I don’t know anything anymore.”

I nodded, biting my lip. It hadn’t occurred to me that he wouldn’t have the same experiences as me. Never once in my life had I ever doubted I was a man. I knew who I was. My body had never confused me, it was just a nuisance. 

Jean hadn’t realized until now that it was even possible to be trans. He hadn’t grown up believing one day he would become who he was meant to be. He didn’t even trust his gut enough to ignore what everyone believed him to be. 

Before now I had hurt for him. Now I was terrified for him.

“Can I ask you some – some kind of personal stuff?” I asked.

His eyes narrowed. “What kind of personal stuff?”

“If you could wake up in a man’s body tomorrow, would you do it?” I didn’t like phrasing it like that, since I didn’t think my body was any less of a man’s. If I phrased it differently he wouldn’t understand, so I bit my tongue and said it the way he needed me to.

His expression was intense. Most people didn't - no one I had ever met before, displayed their soul right in their pupils like he did. I couldn’t understand what I saw yet, but I wanted to. He was vast. I wanted to explore. “I’d do anything to wake up a man tomorrow. To – to look like you,” he breathed. 

I blushed. The wind was knocked out of me. It took me a second to recover. 

“Have you always wanted a man’s body?” 

“Since forever.”

I cleared my throat, tapping my fingers against the table some more. Jean tucked a strand of his hair behind his ear. 

“There’s more to write about than you think,” I told him. 

“Like what?” 

“Well, I don’t know what it’s like for you. But I could tell you what it’s like for me. My story. I write about it all the time.” My cheeks flushed and I ducked my head down so he wouldn’t see. I shifted in my seat and the legs screeched against the floor. I shouldn’t have made the offer. He probably didn’t give a shit. I wanted to write his whole life in five pages, but he probably wanted to write five minutes of mine. 

“Would you show me?” 

My head perked up. “Show you what?”

“Your writing. About, uh…becoming a man.”

“Transitioning,” I corrected, “I’ve always been a man.”

I winced, preparing myself for him to denounce my words. It had never happened to me personally, but I knew it happened to most trans people at some point in their lives. I’d talked to people who had experienced others telling them that they couldn’t identify differently than their assigned genders, and that being trans wasn’t real. Some people – most people, actually – even thought it was a mental disorder. I’d heard the horror stories of conversion therapy and doctors refusing to give their patients hormones. A shiver ran down my back. My fists tightened. 

Jean didn’t say any of that, and I let out a weak sigh. Something in his eyes sparked and he grinned. His eyes turned into half-moons. “Transitioning,” he repeated. “Could you show me your writing about transitioning? If you – like, if it’s not too personal, or whatever.” 

Then Jean was blushing too, and I bit back my smile.

“I don’t have any of it on me.”

“Oh,” he said, and his face fell. His eyes darkened.

“If you want,” I started, already wondering if I should swallow the words I was about to say, “You could come back to my place. I mean, since, we can’t really talk about this sort of thing here anyway…Uh, people could hear.”

As if God had been waiting for a queue, a group of students shuffled through the halls outside the lobby. Their laughs ricocheted off the brick and their chatter filled up the room we were in from wall to wall. 

Jean looked over his shoulder at them as they passed. He turned to face me again. “Yeah, okay. Let’s go.”

…

Jean drove behind me on the way to my apartments. The whole drive my fingers gripped onto the steering wheel to the point that my fingers hurt. I zoned out several times, hitting the breaks a little later than I should have and riding a little too close to the bumper of the car ahead of me. Then it would take me a second too long to realize that the light had turned green before I would go. Jean was probably behind me thinking about what a terrible driver I was. When we finally reached the parking lot of my apartments, I parked and climbed out of my car, blushing. 

If he noticed my driving – I didn’t know how he could have missed it – he didn’t comment on it. He kept his gaze on the cement, his feet pointing inward and his shoulders still hunched. Before I hadn’t quite seen him like this. Maybe it was because I’d only really seen him sitting down, or because I was always too focused on how attractive he was, but Jean looked like he wanted to crawl out of his skin. Like his soul was claustrophobic, curling in on itself inside of him, trying to make as little contact with its host as possible.

“What?” he spit.

“Sorry, uh…nothing. Follow me.” I turned around and walked along the sidewalk headed toward my apartment building. Once inside, we had to climb two flights of stairs to get up to the third floor, and walk down the hall a ways. I unlocked my front door. Jean stepped inside with me. As I closed the door behind him, his eyes wandered around the room. My apartment was small. Almost everything was immediately in sight. 

The kitchen was straight ahead. Some dishes piled up in the sink and the stove was old fashioned with burners. My fridge was old too, and it produced ice inside the freezer when a lever was pushed down. Ice thudded against a bin every once in a while coming from inside the freezer, when I had forgotten to shove the lever up. I didn’t own a kitchen table, only a writing desk that was occupied by my printer and stacks of rough drafts and paperback books. A number of different writing utensils, including highlighters, pens, and red sharpie markers cluttered the spaces between all the paper. 

My living room was tidy, although there was a laundry basket with a pile of unfolded clothes sitting out. My throw pills had been tossed on the floor at some point. Three coffee mugs, all empty, were sitting on my coffee table. None of them were on coasters. My movie collection used to be lined up in alphabetical order on my TV stand, but every time I watched a movie I ended up sprawling them out on the floor. There were a couple opened cases and CDs spread on the carpet. 

My thermostat hummed, still producing cool air, since it was only September and winter wouldn’t arrive in Omaha for another two months. 

Without asking permission, Jean strode to my writing desk. He rolled out my office chair and sat down. His dainty fingers touched my various rough drafts like he was afraid he’d disturb their rest. From what I could tell, he wasn’t reading them, only appreciating their presence the way I thought all writers did. We writers liked to be surrounded by words. Jean looked like he had just found his home within my home. His shoulders were at ease, and a tiny smile tugged at the corners of his lips.

“Those stories aren’t done,” I said.

He nodded. His fingers flicked through several sheets. “Can I see your writing about transitioning?”

I left the room and headed into my bedroom. I had a drawer at the bottom of my tallest dresser filled with a dozen journals and even more stories stapled together, or three-hole-punched and hooked into three-ring binders. I took out the one I knew documented my entire transitioning process. It was blue, and titled “When She Became He.” The binder was heavy in my hands, heavier than most my journals, whether because of the amount of pages or the weight of the words within them, I didn’t know.

Jean and I sat on my couch. He carded through the pages of my story while I sat nearby, looking at my phone screen and pretending I had something to do besides internally panic and contemplate setting the journal on fire and never speaking to him again. 

“You had to go to therapy?” 

“Yeah. A lot of people transitioning do.”

“So it was…it was bad, huh?” I heard him swallow. His fingers trembled as he turned the page. 

“Worst experience of my life.” 

Jean didn’t say it, but he gave me a look. He’d seen the first few pages of the journal; he knew what made me start transitioning. I nodded at him, asking his unanswered question. _Worse than losing your dad? Yes, worse than that._ Although, to be fair, a lot of the reason my experience with therapy was so horrible was _because_ of my dad’s death. 

I began therapy just a few months after he passed. The only reason I did was so that I could transition, but my therapist liked to use my dad’s death as an excuse to tell me I wasn’t trans. He believed that my grief had made me irrational, and had caused me to seek attention from my mourning mom any way I could. I had insisted that I wasn’t going to tell my mom I was transitioning, and that only worried him more. He had said, “Becoming a man won’t make you become someone else’s child,” and “Is this how you’re punishing your father for dying?” 

I regretted ever telling that man my father had died at all. 

Jean turned through a few more pages. Like me, scanning had become second nature to him. He had trained his eyes to see what mattered most on a page, get the gist, and move on without missing much of the story. He was already a third of the way through.

“What was surgery like?” 

I sighed, tapping my fingers against my thighs and tucking my phone back in my pocket. “Worth it. Hard, but worth it.”

“Why hard?” he asked, although he could probably see it on the page. Maybe he just had to hear me say it to believe it.

“I don’t know. A lot of trans guys go through it. They hate having to bind, and all they want is surgery, and then they have the surgery and it’s like…a whole part of them is missing. It’s weird, waking up with a part of your body missing and gone forever. It kinda feels like you lost some of yourself.”

Jean nodded. His fingers trailed over my words, touching them as if they were in graphite, and he might smear them.

“But worth it,” he repeated.

“Worth it.”

“I hate mine,” he said. “I can’t even look at them.”

I glanced at his chest. His V-neck didn’t drop low enough to reveal any cleavage. The shape of them was clearly there, but I could tell he was wearing a sports bra. They were the easiest to put up with.

“Hey,” I said, taking the three-ring binder from his hands. I set it on my coffee table, nudging the mugs back. They clanked against one another. 

“What?” 

“You can read more later,” I said. “Do you want to get rid of them for a while?”

I pointed at his chest. He first glanced down, then looked up at me. His eyebrows furrowed. He nodded. 

I stood and waved at him to follow me into my bedroom. “Actually, do you wanna wear something else too?”

“You don’t have to,” he said, leaning against the paneling along my doorway. The way his hands gripped on to his V-neck like it was suffocating him made me think I did have to. Or at least, he needed me to.

I shrugged, and pulled on the handlebars to my top dresser drawer. My surgery happened months ago, and my scars were fully healed. But I hadn’t thrown any of my binders away, I wasn’t sure why. Sentimental value, I supposed. Or maybe some part of me had always been conscious of my destiny, waiting to bump into Jean one day, preparing to be everything he ever needed. 

I tossed him a plain white binder. He caught it and held it up. “This will get rid of them? It just looks like a sports bra.”

“It’ll flatten your chest, but it’s really uncomfortable.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “Can I use your bathroom?”

I nodded at him and he ducked out of the bedroom, faster than I’d ever seen him move. My bathroom was directly outside of my bedroom, so I didn’t need to give him directions. The door slammed shut, and his feet shuffled around on the tile for a minute while I waited in my bedroom. I had opened up my closet. My hands carded through my clothing. He was a little taller than me, so all my clothes might be slightly too small for him. I tried not to let that bother me, even though I was yet again wishing my testosterone injections would somehow let me grow another inch or two. Five foot seven wasn’t _that_ short, but it was just short enough to make me self-conscious in public. Just short enough that I was almost the average height of a girl. I was so skinny too.

I shivered, trying to shake off the wave of dysphoria that always came when I thought about my height and weight. Jean had it worse than me right now, and I needed to be there for him. Still, I flatted my palm against my chest. I spread my fingers, feeling the plain of my chest and the shapes of my pecks. 

Jean’s feet padded into the bedroom and I jumped, being pulled out of my dysphoric haze. 

He wore nothing but his sweats and the binder. One hand held his limp shirt, and the other clung on to his arm, cradling himself. The binder fit him almost perfectly, which surprised me. But I figured that even though his torso was bigger, his breasts were smaller than mine had been. Binding had been a pain for me, because mine had been almost too big to bind and my frame had been too small. His were much smaller. He could probably pull off looking flat-chested wearing a sports bra most of the time. So in the binder he…

Well fuck, he looked so handsome.

I grinned. “What do you think?”

He bit his lip. I could see how it quivered. Like I had moments before, he pressed his hands against his chest on both sides. He looked down at himself, which I knew would have been hard to do otherwise. He grinned and choked out a laugh that was flooded with so much emotion it was almost a sob. “I can’t believe it,” he choked. He was beaming, too bright for my eyes, I swore. 

I remembered the first time I ever wore a binder. The first day I moved into my new apartment, I ordered one online. When it finally arrived in the mail I tore it open seconds after the door clicked shut and tugged it on. I cried. I stared at myself in the mirror, and I cried. The elation was so strong, I remembered thinking to God _is this what heaven will be like?_

I was still staring, basking in his happiness, but I gestured to my closet. “Pick a shirt. You can wear whatever you want.”

“You really don’t have to.” 

“Dude, I don’t care.”

Jean’s grin managed to stretch even wider at the word ‘dude’. 

“Fine.” Then he strode in front of my closet as I sat down on my bed. His head turned back and forth for a few seconds, before his hands finally plucked one of my T-shirts off the hook. It had three quarter length black sleeves and a gray torso. It was ordinary, dull even, but undeniably masculine. Jean pulled it on, and as he reached his arms over his head I realized he had stopped shaving his armpits the same way he had stopped shaving his legs. He had already begun transitioning before he met me, he just didn’t know it. 

I was about to offer to let him wear some of my pants, but the sweatpants he was wearing already looked like a man’s and in any case his hips were wider than mine and I doubted he’d fit in them. Even if they did, I didn’t want to see his discomfort when my men’s pants hugged too tightly around his wide hips. Testosterone would take care of that someday. I smiled.

If he transitioned – which I thought one day he would – he would do just fine. He was tall. His shoulders were broad considering the body he had, and his breasts were small. He had a strong jaw too. A sharp, long, thin nose. Narrow eyes and thick eyebrows. His body was athletic. Other than his hips, he had almost no extra weight on him. If I had managed to get recognized as male – which I almost always did, he would be able to too.

Jean’s hands continued to spread over his chest in an absentminded way, constantly reminding himself that the binder was there. It would protect him from the suspicions of others. “Thank you,” he said. By the way his voice stammered, I knew he wasn’t used to saying that.

“Whatever,” I said, blushing. “It’s whatever. Go look at yourself in the mirror.”

“I never look in mirrors,” he breathed, but leapt in front of the mirror sitting on my short dresser anyway. He leaned close to it, examining it, pressing his fingers to his reflection as if to make sure it was real. His eyebrows shot up. “I don’t even – if – my hair. If I cut my hair then…”

I grinned. “That’s what I did first. I cut my hair. Have you ever had short hair?”

He shook his head. His hand reached behind him to pull at his pony-tail. He looked at it like it was a severed limb that no longer belonged to him. A vestigial organ that served no purpose and only inconvenienced him, like an appendix. “I don’t know if I could.”

“Do you want short hair?” 

He nodded. “It’s just…really permanent.”

I snorted. “That is the _least_ permanent change out of all the changes. Hair grows back, dude.”

He nodded, still staring at his hair like he couldn’t figure out where it came from. “I guess you’re right.”

It was then that I realized he might not be ready for all this. Maybe I was pushing him to do more than he could handle. The binder could come off, so could the shirt. No one would even have to know this happened. But a haircut couldn’t be hidden.

“You don’t have to do it, ya know.”

“You don’t regret anything, right?” Finally, he turned to face me and dropped his hair behind him. “Everything you’ve changed? You’re glad you did it?”

“It’s more than that. I _needed_ to change. I was dying before.” 

“Me too.”

“Then you want to cut it?” I couldn’t stand the thought of him feeling the way I used to. At this point, I needed to see him change as much as he needed it to happen. Living in that body had been suffocating. 

He nodded. 

“You _sure_?”

He nodded. This time his jaw was clenched and his expression firm. “Before I met you I didn’t know there was another option, but I can’t live like this anymore.”

I stood up, facing him. And with some amount of bravery, I placed my hand against his chest. “Keep my binders. I don’t need them anymore.”

His lip quivered.

“Do you want me to cut your hair?” 

He looked me up and down, and then at my hair, which was growing out again in long, floppy, brown strands I was constantly flicking out of my eyes. “ _Can_ you cut it?”

“Well, if we take you to get it cut like this they’re gonna think you’re a girl. If _I_ cut it first, so that it'll at least look like a guy’s hair, then when we take you to get it cut by a professional you might pass.”

“Pass?” 

“Uh…It’s when people can’t figure out that you’re trans.”

“Trans,” he repeated. He hadn’t removed my hand from his chest. Part of me thought he wanted me to touch him, so that another person could witness how his chest felt the way it was supposed to be. I could feel his heartbeat. “I guess that’s what I am, isn’t it?” 

“It’s not so bad. I promise.”

He smiled. “It’s worth it?”

I smiled back. “Worth it.”


	3. Chapter 3

In the bathroom, Jean sat on one of my kitchen chairs facing the mirror. He didn’t look at himself. His eyes wandered toward the shower curtain hanging that depicted a map of the world. Then he was gazing at my tooth brush, and the faucet, and my soap. Finally, they settled on my razor and shaving cream.

As I plugged my electric buzzer into the outlet, Jean asked, “Do you have to shave?”

I tilted my head at him, and my eyes met his in the mirror. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you actually get a beard? You know, that you have to shave?” He pointed at the razor and shaving cream, then to the buzzer I was holding. 

I smiled. “Yeah. I shave every day.”

His eyebrows shot up as he watched me set the buzzer on the counter top. I pulled the scissors I’d grabbed a moment ago from my kitchen out of my back pocket.

“Not with that,” I said, pointing at the buzzer. “I’ve never grown out my beard enough to use that on it. But only because I don’t really like having a beard. I _can_ grow one if I want to, and I _have_ before, but once I started to pass even without a beard I kept shaving. I first bought the buzzer to shave my head. When I moved in.”

Jean’s hand reached up to touch his face. His thumb and forefinger traced over the sharp outline of his jaw. His fingers flattened and rubbed his smooth cheek. 

“You'll have a beard too. You know, if you want one.”

“I do,” he replied. “I really do. I can’t imagine shaving. I don’t think I’d want to.”

Jean’s hair was pulled up into a pony-tail at the very top of his head. I held it straight up by the ends, tried not to smile at how cute he looked in the mirror, and slid the scissors open before placing his hair between the blades. I waited for him to give me permission, and even after he nodded, I waited for the doubt to vanish from his eyes. Once his expression was indifferent, then I snipped his hair.

He reached back and I handed him his hair. He tied it in a not and held on to it. “Shit,” he breathed, before he tossed it on the counter. As if to distract himself from what had just happened, he asked, “You shaved your head?” 

I nodded. “I’d wanted to do it for years. It was the first thing I started doing to try to…you know, look manly. Once I started T – testosterone therapy – I let it grow out a little bit at a time. I didn’t think I’d want to shave either…I thought I’d always have a bald head and a beard. But once you transition…all those masculine traits you were dying to have…like – you know, looking super manly – kind of go away. At least for me. I realized if I had been assigned male at birth I probably would have never wanted a beard or liked how they look. I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about letting my hair get long either.”

I was still cutting Jean’s hair. The strands were floating to the floor in clumps, like fall leaves. Right now I wasn’t trying to make it look any certain way. I just wanted it short enough to buzz. Then he could decide what he wanted me to do with it. Well, try to do with it. 

“I don’t think I care about facial hair as much as, like, being strong,” he almost whispered. Our eyes met, and I got the distinct impression that he wasn’t just _saying_ that, he was _admitting_ it. His eyes darted away and he bit his lip. He was embarrassed about this. I thought back to all the times I’d stared a little too long at his lithe body. He probably already worked out. I could easily picture him weightlifting. But in the body he had, weightlifting would only get him so far. 

“Yeah, I understand. I don’t worry about it that much, I guess. But it’s no big deal.” My voice didn’t sound very reassuring, so I hoped I had at least pulled off an indifferent expression. Honestly, I didn’t think anything of this confession. But even though I couldn’t personally relate to it, I felt his pain anyway. I’d felt it with wanting facial hair, a lower voice, and a flat chest. 

Since I wasn’t trying to make it look neat, I had already clipped off almost all of his hair. I had started on the right side, then the top, before working my way to the back of his head. I only had the right side now. I kept cutting, filling the room with the sound of metal blades clashing. Somehow, the silence was comfortable. Even by myself, unless I was writing, silence made my head hurt. But with him, it was comforting. It put the whole world on mute for the sound of his breathing.

I finished cutting his hair. It was a few inches long – longer in some places than in others – and reaching out in every direction. 

Jean smirked. “Thanks. It looks like shit.”

“You asshole. It’s a masterpiece,” I said, and I ruffled it. Chunks of it that hadn’t escaped yet dove to the floor. I brushed more of it off his shoulders.

When I glanced at him again, his eyes were kind of wide. For a moment, I was afraid I’d offended him. I had a nasty mouth, and very rarely thought twice about using it around others because normally I didn’t give a shit what they thought of it. But with Jean I did, and until now I had tried to tame it. I opened my mouth to apologize. He cut me off.

“No one’s ever called me an asshole before,” he explained.

My eyebrows furrowed. “Sorry…I didn’t mean you were an actual –”

“No,” he said, “No, you don’t get it. I always get called a _bitch_.”

I snorted. “Do you get called that a lot?”

He deadpanned. “Yeah. A lot.”

My eyebrows raised. “So are you telling me you deserve to be called an asshole?”

He tilted his head back so he could look at me, and not through the mirror. “I mean, _I_ never think I’m being an asshole.” As he said it, he wore a devilish grin that exposed two perfect rows of teeth. His eyes glinted. 

I couldn’t help but grin back. Seeing him smile like that made my bathroom all blurry. We were in a _very_ cramped bathroom. His face was close enough that if I wanted to, all it would take was tilting my head down to kiss him. He smelled like mint and early mornings, when the fog hadn’t yet vanished. It had been rainy this morning, and the scent had clung to his skin.

“Eren?” he asked.

“Huh?” I asked, being pulled from my trance. “Oh, sorry. Um, what do you want me to do with the rest of this?” I gestured to his mop of hair. 

Jean’s hand circled around his head. I was apparently supposed to understand. Then he added, “Just, like, buzz the sides. Can’t stand this shit touching my ears. It’s itchy as fuck.”

I did as he said, buzzing around the sides of his head. He winced a couple of times while watching the hair land on his shoulders. I kept brushing it off. Once, as I traveled to the other side of his head, he reached up to touch the velvety hair left over. I trimmed close to the back of his neck, trying to force my gaze away from his smile. After his neck, I buzzed off the remaining hair around his right ear and clicked the buzzer off. Jean flicked away the remaining hair on his shoulders before standing.

When he turned around to face me he was grinning. The buzzed portions of his hair were a darker blonde – almost brown – in comparison to the longer hair on top of his head. I imagined the longer strands of hair had been faded by sunlight over the course of the summer, but the shorter buzzed area was just baby hair that hadn’t been damaged yet. His fingers were trailing through his hair, grooming it and feeling the ends of it and scratching his scalp. Unable to get enough of the sensation, I could tell. If my fingers were in his hair, I doubted I’d get enough of it either.

“Well?” I asked.

“Still looks like shit. But I like it. I love it, actually.” His fingers finally pulled away from his hair. One hand rubbed the back of his neck and he was looking away from me again. “Thanks, Eren.”

“You won’t be thanking me when your hairstylist gets a look at the mess I’ve made,” I replied, even though I wanted to tell him he was welcome. He didn’t even have to thank me. I wanted to do this for him. I wanted him to feel the way I had when I did it the first time. I felt like I was the fortunate one here, not him. I was the one that got to introduce him to being a man, step by step.

Jean’s eyebrows rose. He looked at the door, but I assumed he was seeing quite a ways beyond it. “Are we going today?”

“Think we better. Unless you want to go to school like that tomorrow.”

He laughed and shook his head. 

“Then let’s go,” I said, and pointed my thumb over my shoulder at the bathroom door.

“Wait.” He swiveled back around and gestured toward all of his hair. It spread out across the floor and the sink. “Shouldn’t we take care of all this?”

I shook my head. “We’ll take care of it when we get back.”

He bit his lip to hide a smile. “I’m coming back?”

I blushed and stared at my toes. Shifting my weight from one leg to the other, I shrugged. “I mean, if you want.”

“Okay.”

He followed me out to my living room with one of his hands roaming through his buzzed hair, when I realized – _shit_ , his walk. 

I knew that when _I_ looked at him I didn’t see a girl, and when _I_ watched him walk I didn’t see a “girl’s walk”, but others would. It had startled me when I first began to transition. I had gotten to the point that if I took a picture of myself I saw a man, but when I walked around in public I couldn’t figure out why people stared. 

Eventually I noticed that the women in my classes were really uncomfortable around me. At first I just thought that I was seeing what I had experienced earlier in life from the other perspective. I’d been around my share of men that had made me feel uncomfortable and I could understand that. But what I didn’t understand was _what_ I had done to make them feel uncomfortable exactly. 

I hadn’t hit on any of them or even really checked any of them out. I wasn’t even at a point in my life when I was even _thinking_ about a relationship, let alone considering who to have one with. I didn’t speak up in class either, so I knew it couldn’t have been any of the opinions I had. I hadn’t even spoken to most of them.

It wasn’t until one girl asked me if I was single did I figure it out. I told her I was, wondering if she was about to ask me out, and she had asked me if I was gay. I had shrugged, and told her that I had dated men but wouldn’t consider myself gay. She had responded, “Wait…so you’re not a lesbian?” 

The instant she said it, I had to swallow the curse words and insults climbing up my throat. Before transitioning, I would have spoken my mind, but afterward I had learned there were some things I couldn’t do. I had secrets to protect now, words at the back of my mind waiting to be slipped out carelessly that would expose me, and I couldn’t risk it. So instead I had kicked out my chair from underneath me and left the classroom, making up some lame excuse on my way out so that my teacher wouldn’t fail me. 

When I got home, I tried to figure out what made them think I was a lesbian. It was the point in my transition before I had been able to grow any facial hair, but after I had shaved my head. The testosterone had managed to make the shape of my body more masculine, my hips weren’t so wide anymore. I never left the house without binding. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a man. 

But when I walked away from the mirror I looked over my shoulder at myself. 

I had learned how to be recognized as a man sitting still. But men walked a certain way. They spoke differently. They wore different expressions. Had different posture. Well, not _all_ men of course, but _many_ did. The men I needed to imitate in order to not be mistaken for a lesbian did. 

Everything, everything, everything had to be learned, practiced, memorized, and transformed into my natural behavior. 

Jean would too, assuming he wanted to.

“What?” Jean asked, looking down at himself as if looking for a stain or maybe hair he missed. 

“Listen,” I said, already feeling like shit for even bringing it up, “When I transitioned, I had to learn how to do a lot of stuff. Like…walk without swaying my hips…”

Jean’s eyes widened in understanding as he looked down at his hips. He placed his hands on them and I winced. No one would ever look at him with his hands on his hips, and recognize him as a man. It was depressing, it was wrong, it was unfair, but it was true. Everything, everything, everything in the world had a gender. Standing with your hands on your hips was feminine, and therefore by default, according to everyone in the world it seemed – female. 

“Shit,” he hissed. “Okay, I’ll stop.”

“You know that you don’t have –”

“I do,” he interrupted. I pressed my lips into a tight line. He added, “Not for them, okay? I don’t give a shit about other people. I have to do it for me.”

I smiled. He was already in a place that had taken me years to reach. Before now, I couldn’t recall a moment I had ever felt proud of someone else, and the first time I did it was for a man I hardly know. 

“Good. That’s how it should be,” I told him.

He fought a smile, I imagined because he was trying to look manlier, tougher. Smiling was something I had given up for a long time too. He’d get over it later on. Smiling was for everyone.

“Will you show me?” he asked, “What else, uh, do I gotta do?”

I walked Jean through the process of how I had learned to be recognized as a man. Stand up straight. Tilt his head up. Spread his feet. Broaden his shoulders. Walk like there wasn’t any reason for people to question him. Look bored or indifferent as much as possible. Don’t avoid eye contact. Don’t swerve for people in the halls. Don’t sit with his knees too close together. Don’t touch his sides. Don’t walk in-footed. Don’t walk with a short stride. Don’t bend his wrists when pointing, waving, or lifting. Don’t lean on one hip. 

So many little behaviors that most people didn’t think twice about. Little motions and expressions that over time had earned a gender, no matter how ridiculous gendering body language was. 

He listened to me. He mimicked each bit of advice. Again, he was being cute and I had to fight the urge to tell him so. Hearing he was cute would not help him feel masculine at all. 

Once we were done, although I had already viewed him as his true gender before this, I knew that if he kept this up people might recognize him as male too. Jean wore an expression of determination, purpose that not only suited his personality well but made it clear that he took this very seriously. Like me, he’d master it in time and do it without thinking. Or at the very least, practice it enough to be able to act the way he needed to in times his gender identity might compromise his safety, and that gave me some hope. 

…

At the mall, Jean walked a pace or two behind me, as if shielding himself. I’d never admit how much I liked the idea of that, but I was also worried about him. I kept looking over my shoulder at him, and then whipping my head forward once I reminded myself yet again that staring at him wasn’t helping. 

The problem wasn’t that he wasn't recognized. He was, at least at first glance. He was tall enough that people wouldn’t look for any more evidence of his gender unless he gave them a reason to. His pace at least looked natural to him. His feet didn’t veer inward and his strides were long. His hips weren’t swaying either, not even a little. 

The problem wasn’t that he didn’t look like a man. The problem was the he didn’t look like _he_ thought he looked like a man. 

While he’d managed to keep up a masculine façade all the way to my car, and even in the passenger seat on the way, I could tell he was struggling now. His chin was held high, but his jaw was clenched. His arms hung limp at his sides, and I could tell it was difficult for him to walk with them hanging like that. Despite having a decent walk, he hadn’t managed to walk like there wasn’t any reason for him to be questioned. He looked outright guilty. 

Eventually, he clung to his arm. His eyes were flickering all over the place, analyzing every group of people that strolled past and every bored salesman sitting at the stands lined up through the middle of the hallway. A girl nearby shrieked at something her friend had said and he jumped. An older man stared at him for a little too long. Jean noticed, and he ducked his head down. I glared at the man until he looked away. We got separated in a group of people walking toward us, and they too gave Jean funny looks as he veered around them. I hoped my glare burned the memory of my face into their heads. I hoped those people felt guilty the rest of the day for being rude. 

Jean looked at me as if he was afraid he had disappointed me or had made me angry. I _was_ disappointed and angry, but not with him. I was with everybody else. No one should have to be put through this. No one should have to put himself on a stage and act a certain way, just because people wouldn’t respect him if he acted like himself. 

When we finally reached the hair salon I was relieved. Jean looked skittish, like the moment someone spoke to him he’d dart away. 

Still, when a woman that had been sweeping hair up further back in the salon approached the counter at the front of the salon, he looked her in the eyes. 

The woman giggled when she saw his hair. I only realized then that the people staring at him in the hall were staring at my butcher’s job on his hair, not his body language. Jean deadpanned and sighed at the woman. She swallowed her laughter and cleared her throat. She glanced at me and then back at Jean.

“Can I help you?” Her voice was patronizing, because she knew – very obviously – that we needed her help. 

“What do you think?” I spit, “ _Can you?_ ” 

Her jaw dropped in response. She was at a loss for words for a second too long. Her attitude sobered before I even finished speaking. 

She pointed a pen at Jean. “You need a haircut?”

He nodded. 

She then pointed her pen at me. “Do you?” 

I shook my head, and she returned her attention to Jean. “What’s your name?”

The woman had begun typing something up on the computer, so she didn’t notice Jean panic. She didn’t see his mouth open but no words fall out. She didn’t see his eyes widened just a bit, and his pupils dilate. I knew he hadn’t forgotten not to say “Jeanice”. I knew he _wanted_ to say “Jean”, but was only now remembering that he didn’t sound the way people thought men should sound. 

I winced. “His name is Jean.”

Her head perked up at my words. While looking him up and down, she squinted at Jean. I did my best to look unfazed, as if I had no idea what she was doing. Jean did the same, although his body and face were a little stiff. 

Either she had decided that we weren’t lying about his gender, or she had decided to let it go, because she didn’t comment on it. Instead, she told him that he should follow her and he did, looking over his shoulder at me one last time. I smiled at him. Hopefully, she wouldn’t question him too much while she cut his hair. If nothing else, she had already seemed to understand that neither of us appreciated much she had to say.

While Jean was getting his hair cut, I sat on one of the nearby chairs. Shelving cluttered with different brands of hair products obscured my vision of him in the salon chair. Only the motion of the hairdresser’s hands and her pink flip flops on the floor were visible through it. But her voice rang throughout the whole store, even over the sounds of other hairdressers speaking with their costumers and a nearby woman talking on her cell phone waiting to be acknowledged by an employee. Only when a hair dryer blew was the sound of her squeaky voice cancelled out. She chatted about her life, her dogs, her least favorite costumers and the bad haircuts that had happened this week. Jean never spoke, although he was probably nodding or shaking his head every time she asked him a question about his hair. 

About twenty minutes later she asked him if he liked it. I leaned in my chair just enough to peer around the shelves, and see him nod. He was smiling, so I figured he wasn’t doing it just to placate her. Also, I couldn’t find anything wrong with his hair at all. In fact, as he walked my way tilting his head so that he could flick the stray strands out of his eyes, I thought that I wanted nothing more than for that mop of hair to be on one of my pillows. With his head tilting back. And maybe a bunch of R rated things happening. 

He stood right in front of me, running his fingers through the buzzed undercut around his ears. “What do you think?”

I swallowed, having some trouble with it. He was close enough I could feel the warmth of his body. Right now, he stood confidently, wearing the smirk I knew I hadn’t taught him but was about the most masculine, sexy thing I’d seen all day. “Um…Do you like it?”

His eyebrows furrowed like he was confused. “Yeah.”

Another second passed before I realized he actually wanted my opinion. “Then I do too,” I said, hoping that he would think I was being honest but not too invested. 

He smiled. The woman called his name. Neither of us had paid yet. Jean dug into his sweatpants only to realize that they were empty. He winced.

“Eren,” He spoke under his breath. “I left my purse in my car.”

I shrugged. I’d already intended to pay for him. “Don’t worry about it.”

Reaching into my own pocket, I pulled out my wallet and walked up to the cash register. The woman that had cut his hair was still staring at Jean in her periphery, but she still said nothing. If Jean was lucky, that was the most he’d get from most people. Curious stares and tilted heads and squinted eyes, but no one would outright ask him about what was in his pants. 

We left the salon after I paid the hairdresser. I even tipped her, because she gave Jean the haircut that was going to keep me from focusing in my classes for the next week. 

“Hey,” Jean said as we headed back to my car, “Thanks for paying for it.”

“I was the one that chopped it off.”

“I know but –”

“Seriously, don’t worry about it,” I repeated, “It looks, you know, really good.”

“Yeah?” he asked.

I couldn’t even look at him, but I nodded.

We walked together back to my car. Jean kept running his fingers through his hair whenever he wasn’t thinking or paying attention. Because of this, I couldn’t stop smiling whenever I caught him doing it. He liked his hair, but it wasn’t just about that. Like growing out his leg hair, it was something he could touch. It was tangible evidence of exterior masculinity for once. 

…

At my place, Jean and I decided to actually start working on our stories. My apartment was cramped, and there was only one writing desk. Usually I didn’t even write at my writing desk. I edited, I deleted, I researched, I did all the excess shit surrounding writing, but I didn’t write at my writing desk. It was suffocating sitting there, surrounded by clutter inside a cramped apartment. Instead, I told him we’d write on my balcony and he didn’t argue. 

Now, his legs had slid through the vertical guard rails of my balcony. Mine had too. We sat on the wood floor with our laptops between us and our foreheads pressed against the rails. The sun was still out, but it was just late enough in the year that it had begun to hover low by this time of day. The clouds had been tinted pink and violet as they veiled the sun’s rays. All the surrounding apartment buildings and trees were just silhouettes. Once in a while, a car drove through and its headlights flashed and made shadows dance across the ground and walls. Birds were chirping, and the branches of nearby trees stirred. Our thoughts were louder than all that. 

Like me, Jean wanted to actually know something about me before writing a story with me as the protagonist. With each question, I hoped he was asking because he wanted to know what it was like to be me. More than that even, I hoped he was asking because he wanted to know me. That was why I was asking him, after all. Research for my story was just an excuse by now.

“So…if you’re a junior, but you’re twenty-one already, then that means you skipped a year,” he said, “Right?”

I nodded. “I moved here when I was eighteen, but I didn’t go to school right away. I had to wait a year because otherwise I’d have to pay out-of-state tuition.”

He pursed his lips. “Do you get financial aid?”

“Yeah.”

Jean stared at his computer screen. His fingers rested on the keys but he hadn’t pressed any so far. Most of his questions had been superficial.

“I don’t get it,” he said, “So you move here when you’re eighteen…You’ve got no job at first, and you don’t go to school right away, so it’s not just financial aid…but you’ve gotten a surgery and you’re paying for testosterone…injections? Injections, right?” I nodded. “How…how are you paying for all this?”

Jean’s eyes met mine. His gaze was unapologetic, despite the complete invasion of privacy. I only smiled, because either he didn’t realize that all that information was too personal – even for a story about my life – or because he was too upfront of a man to worry about invading privacy. Either way, I decided I liked it about him.

I exhaled, buying myself some time. I pressed my lips together. Jean must have noticed that I was hesitant to tell him, because he looked away from me and ran his fingers through his hair. Just when his mouth opened to ask me a different question – because I didn’t think it would be an apology, he wasn’t giving in that easily – I started telling him what I had never spoken out loud before.

“Before I moved here, I applied to colleges all over the country. Colleges I thought I could more or less afford to go to….which was most of them. Because my dad was a surgeon. Basically…my family is, you know, rich,” I said, feeling my cheeks heat up. “Normally when a rich kid applies to school he can’t get financial aid…but my mom never worked and my dad just died. When I moved here…I didn’t just wait a year to go to school so I could avoid out-of-state tuition. I did it so that my mom would go a whole year without any income. That way, when I applied for financial aid the income on her taxes couldn’t prevent me from getting aid.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, that’s not it,” I said, feeling the nerves flutter in my chest. “Just because my mom didn’t look that rich on my FAFSA doesn’t mean she wasn’t…she sends me money each semester to pay for college, because she doesn’t know I get financial aid.”

Jean’s jaw dropped. “Are you fucking shitting me?”

I shook my head. “She asks how much I need, I tell her. She thinks she’s paying for my school.”

“But she’s not?”

“No. My financial aid covers my schooling. I work for my school’s writing center, between that and bartending over the summer, I’m paying for my testosterone. The money my mom sends me pays for my rent and other bills. She uh, she also paid for my surgery.”

Jean shook his head. But he wasn’t judging me, or disapproving of me. He was just absolutely shocked. He didn’t give a shit about what I was doing behind my mom’s back. 

“Your mom doesn’t even know you’re trans?” he asked.

“Nope.”

Jean began typing on his computer. It took everything I had not to peek. A writer’s notes were personal, and usually inscrutable. He had the right to talk shit about me if he wanted to. Not a day went by that I didn’t feel guilty for betraying my mom. It kept me up at night even more than my nightmares did. The only thing that got me through the day was telling myself it was better this way. She would rather believe she was paying college tuition for a daughter who was too busy working forty hours a week and too poor to call her, than find out her son had chopped his breasts off and injected himself with hormones for years to the point that he might not be able to get pregnant. Or worse, find out that her son, who might not be able to get pregnant, prayed for that to be true all the time. 

My mom often used to say, “Your sins are between you and God.” 

Until this night, they had been. Now they were between God, me, and Jean. 

When Jean was done typing, he looked at me the same way he always had. I had the feeling he was about to ask me to elaborate – maybe on how I slept at night – but it was only fair that I got to ask him questions now. If I forced myself to be patient a moment longer I’d be squirming where I sat.

“I get to ask questions now.”

Jean smirked at me, clearly amused by the eagerness in my voice. He nodded like he was humoring me. Clearly, he had nothing he was ashamed of. Nothing he would mind me knowing about. 

It took several long seconds to regain my breath. His eyes were molten in this light, his skin glowing, and his hair wafted in the breeze. All I wanted to ask was _Can I kiss you?_

I didn’t ask him that. Not because I didn’t have the courage, but because I still had no idea if he was attracted to men. 

And because the last thing I wanted in the world right now was to ruin whatever we had going. Literally almost, the last thing. I thought I’d probably rather total my car, or fail a class, or drop my phone in the toilet than scare him away. 

So I went the route he’d taken. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one,” he responded.

“But you’re a freshmen?” 

He nodded. For a moment I hesitated to ask the most obvious question, but decided that he hadn’t spared me the invasion. He probably wouldn’t appreciate me treating him differently. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I’m not rich.”

“Do you get aid?” 

“Yeah.”

“You’re not going to make this easy for me are you?” 

He gave me a bashful and embarrassed smile for calling him out. “Okay, fine. The reason I didn’t start school when I was eighteen is because my mom’s a stay-at-home mom, and my dad’s a stay-away-from-home dad. Problem is, my mom isn’t a stay-at-home mom by choice. She’s uh…she’s not able to work. I’ve put off going to school for three years so that I could save some money and support us. And even now, I’m only a part-time student.”

“Oh,” I mumbled, “I shouldn’t have –”

“I don’t care if people know. There’s no reason to hide it.”

His tone was enough to convince me he wasn’t lying. Not only did he not want my pity, but he truly didn’t think his situation was pitiful. Already I felt guilty for feeling like he would, like he’d pity his mom because of something she couldn’t help. 

“She’s schizophrenic,” he continued, “Which, most of the time she takes her meds and there isn’t a problem. But sometimes she goes off them, and it can take a very long time to get her back on them. When she’s on her meds, I don’t have to take care of her. And if she were always on her meds, she could hold down a job. But she hasn’t worked in years because for like…I want to say twenty or more years, none of my family could get her to go to a doctor, and when she finally did she was misdiagnosed at first. During that time she couldn’t work because of her symptoms. Now, she doesn’t feel like she could work even when she’s on her meds. She dropped out of high school and doesn’t have a diploma.”

I nodded, unsure what to say. I didn’t know very much about the disease. 

My face must have given my concerns away because Jean reassured me again, “It’s okay. The reason I’m in school now is because she’s doing better.”

“Where’s your dad?” I asked.

Jean winced. Obviously he didn’t mind talking about his mom. His dad must have been a different story.

“Who knows?” he muttered, scoffing. “My dad left my mom by the time I was five. And he doesn't have to pay child support anymore so...he could be anywhere.”

“Did he know she was sick when he left?” I asked.

Jean glared at me. “Does it fucking matter if he did?”

I rose my hands up in surrender. “Whoa, no, it doesn’t. He shouldn’t have left either way. I was just curious.”

Jean straightened out his expression so that it wasn’t so angry. His eyes roamed, taking in the sight of the sun beginning to drop closer to the horizon. The sky was tinted lavender and all the nearby window’s reflections were glowing shades of gold and amber. His eyes were the same way.

“I don’t know if he did. I know my mom was showing signs of it around that time, but I really doubt my dad believed she was sick. He probably just thought…I don’t know. The way men think about women, ya’ know?”

“Yeah,” I replied, “I know.”

“Men think we’re – God,” he muttered, and smiled, shaking his head. “I guess I can’t really bitch about men anymore.”

I smiled. “It takes a while to stop thinking of yourself as…you know, like part of the ‘we’ when talking about women.”

“Just sounds weird in my head now to consider myself a woman,” he said, “like it’s hard to believe I ever thought I was part of that and…it just happened really quick. Thinking of myself as a man, for real, and not just wishing for it. It’s hard to get used to.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, just because you’re not part of that anymore doesn’t mean you have to be part of…I don’t know, you don’t have to be _that_ kind of man in order to actually _be_ a man.”

He nodded, and we were silent for a second. His eyes zoned out. All I wanted to know was where he went when he was deep in thought like that. If I was still in his thoughts, if what I had to say had any influence over it, if his mind was in a better place because of me. 

“I think he just thought she was a bitch, or clingy, or whatever,” he finally added, after his train of thought circled back to our conversation. “Thought she was crazy.”

“He sounds like a fucking douchebag.”

“Yeah. He never wanted me either. I was an accident. I think since the day I was born he was looking for an excuse. No one else seemed that surprised that he’d left. Like, everyone just thought me or my mom drove him away. I hate how people make excuses for people like him.” Jean pulled his legs out from in between the railings, so that he could hug his knees to his chest. His fingers were long, his knuckles prominent, and his nails clipped down to the pads of his fingers. I wished I could hold one of his hands, because his grip on his own wrist had to pinch.

While Jean spoke, I turned to my laptop and began typing down notes. But I didn’t write down what he said. I found myself describing the way his face became so exhausted and the way his knuckles rapped against the balcony floor and the way his jaw clenched and the way his eyes stared at the horizon line like he thought he’d never reach it. 

The sun had finally begun to hide behind the earth. The air had chilled and a few stars peeked through the clouds overhead. Jean’s face had paled under the moon. Only now was I realizing that we’d spent nearly the entire day together. We’d spent the last couple of hours learning each other, speaking openly about thoughts we didn’t dare to speak out loud normally. Or at least, I never had. Some part of me hoped that I was special in this conversation too, that Jean wouldn’t speak about his mom or at the very least his dad with just anyone. 

But I thought he probably would, because as far as I could tell Jean was honest. He was proud. He seemed like the type of man who was just happy to get by, to live day to day without struggling. He had accepted the fate he’d been given, and held no grudge toward his mom for it. I hadn’t even spoken on the phone with my mom in over a year. A pang of jealousy resonated in my chest. If only I could be so brave, so complacent, so accepting of the life God had given me. 

But I couldn’t, and that was why I had escaped to transition when I was eighteen and Jean was only just becoming acquainted with his true self now. Complacency with life had a price I wasn’t willing to pay, and frankly I thought he’d already spent too much on. 

“I’m sorry,” I told him honestly.

“No one’s ever asked me about my dad before,” he said quietly.

“Never?” 

He shook his head. “They probably assume I don’t want to talk about him. And they’re right, I don’t want to. That’s why I never have.”

“Shit. You didn’t have –”

“I wanted to tell you,” he said, “But don’t write about my dad. He has nothing to do with me.”

I swallowed my apology. I bit back my smile. So he _had_ opened up to me. “Okay. I won’t bring him up again.” 

Jean shrugged. Any sadness left in his eyes drained away. “Fuck him.”

“Yeah, _fuck_ him,” I repeated, and Jean grinned.

Then the sun fell behind the earth altogether and Jean’s eyes turned toward the street lamplights flickering to life.

“Shit, what time is it?” he asked. 

I glanced at my laptop. “Almost nine.”

“I should probably go,” he mumbled. His eyes drifted toward the parking lot to the right of my building. 

Biting back my invitation for him to stay at my place, I said, “Yeah, okay.”

He faced me then. His eyes narrowed as he scrutinized me. “Thanks for today.”

“For what?” I asked.

“My hair. The binder…Everything.” Since I was breathless, I couldn’t respond. Jean’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped. “Oh fuck.”

“What?” 

“I didn’t even…my mom. She’s going to be pissed when she sees my hair.” 

I frowned, feeling my heart patter in my chest as I considered what he was implying. “What do you mean? It’s just hair.”

“Just…she has no idea about me. I don’t know what she’ll think about me coming out to her.”

“So, just like that, you’re going to go home tonight and tell your mom you’re a man?” I asked. 

He sighed. His head rested against the balcony rails. He mulled over the question before he said, “Right now, it’s easy to say I will. But…I don’t know if I have the guts.”

He had more than me for even _considering_ coming out. “You know…if you’re not ready…”

He shook his head. “I try not to make decisions based on whether or not I’m ready.”

My eyebrows furrowed and I stared at him blankly until he explained.

“Because I don’t think I’m ever going to be ready. That’s how I feel about most things. No sense waiting to be ready if it’s never going to happen. I’d never live my life if I waited to be ready to live it. And death isn’t going to wait until I’m ready to die, either.”

Very few moments in my life had rendered me speechless, but this was one of them. It might just be that I wasn’t in Jean’s life to save him, but him in mine to save me. 

“So you’ll tell her?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm. My chest felt like it had been inflated with helium. 

“Not tonight,” he responded, tilting his head to the side as if he was considering when to plan a dentist appointment. “Soon though. I’ll have to. She’s going to start wondering about all the…” He gestured to his hair and his clothes. 

“You’re going to dress like that for school tomorrow?” I asked. 

“I don’t have any guys’ clothes yet. So, no. I guess.” 

“You can have that shirt. You can borrow more of mine,” I offered.

“You’ve already done a lot.” Jean’s face was stern, but his blush gave him away. 

“I know.” I wanted to do more. I wanted him to need me to do more. I wanted him to need me at all. 

“Okay,” he said. Then he rubbed his neck and fidgeted where he was sitting. He stood up and looked away from me, as if he couldn’t face me in that moment. When he spoke again his words were rushed. “Do you, uh, want to get together again soon? Because, I didn’t really get enough to write my story today.”

“Yes,” I blurted, probably too quickly, probably too desperately. “We can get together again tomorrow or…you know, whenever.”

The more I tried to sound casual, the more pathetic I sounded. 

“Yeah, sure. Tomorrow after school.” If he noticed my blubbering, his face didn’t show it. “I’ll text you.” 

I stood then too. We both carried our laptops back into my apartment. Jean grabbed his things. I watched him from where I leaned against my hallway wall, wishing that I could kiss him, or hug him, or ask him to stay. But I didn’t, so when he was ready I smiled at him as he stepped out the door. 

“Tomorrow, right?” he double-checked. I nodded. “Good. See ya’, Eren.”

“Bye, Jean,” I replied, wondering what all the possible implications of him saying “good” could be.

After he was gone, I made my way to my bathroom to get ready for bed. Jean’s hair was strewn everywhere still, and I remembered that we were supposed to have cleaned it up. My fingers threaded through his pony-tail still tucked into the hairband. The whole room smelled of his minty shampoo. I picked up the pony-tail, but found that I didn’t feel right throwing it away myself, for some reason. 

On the floor near the tub, I found his black sports bra. He had forgotten to grab it before he left. It had probably been the last thing on his mind. Despite myself, I shivered while picking it up. I felt downright wrong for touching it at all, but I reminded myself it wasn’t the same as finding a girl’s bra. A bra for a trans man was just a means to an end, something he had to put up with, not much different than a binder. I placed it on the countertop beside his pony-tale. All of Jean’s residual femininity was in one place. And of all the places this could have happened, it was my bathroom.

Jean could take care of the hair and grab his sports bra tomorrow. 

I wanted nothing more than another night of him telling me who he was. Thanking God that he had asked to see me again soon, I smiled. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I had more to be thankful for than to pray for, and it was all because of Jean.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter Eren and Jean do something symbolic, Jean talks about a dark part of his past, and Eren remembers the one time he hesitated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, for starters I'm sorry it's been a while since the update! 
> 
> But also, I know some of you reading this have read all my fics, and that's not only AMAZING but if you HAVE read all my fics then you know there are a few characters I stray away from. One of them is Levi. 
> 
> But in this chapter you get to meet my Levi.

Like yesterday, when our classes were over for the day, Jean and I drove to my apartment. Our conversations were becoming comfortable, almost as if we had known each other much longer. I asked Jean how his mom reacted to his hair first. For a moment when I first saw him at school again I had forgotten it was short. But nearly at the same moment I was confused by his short hair I was also struck by how fucking hot he looked today. He approached me in the library this time, running his fingers through his hair and gripping on to a textbook. It was obvious to me that he’d practiced his walk, although I didn’t think anyone would look at him and be able to tell he was trying to walk a certain way besides me. The point was, he walked like a man and it looked damn good on him. 

“She was,” he started, in response to my question, “surprised. She told me I look like a boy.”

I laughed without humor. “Yeah?”

He nodded as we walked out of the library together. 

“Well, that’s good I guess,” I responded. 

He sighed. “Yeah, it should be, right? But all I can think is: no, I don’t. If I really looked like a boy, people would act like I was one. They would assume I was one. They wouldn’t still be calling me Jeanice and using ‘she’ when they talked about me.”

I contemplated what he said for a second. If I had ever at any point been told I looked like a boy before I transitioned, I would have been overjoyed. Hearing him explain it like that changed everything though. It made me feel cold and defeated. But since I looked like a cis man now, I just felt sorry for Jean. He was going through this right now, not me. His perspective was far bleaker. 

“I never thought of it that way,” I said. We walked down a path surrounding one of the colleges toward the parking lot we’d both parked in. Jean stared at his feet when he walked. He only did that when he was thinking.

“Yeah. I think what my mom meant was I’m not doing what a girl is supposed to do. I think she thought that if she told me I looked like a boy, I would regret cutting my hair and grow it out again.” 

I laughed, and Jean gave me an annoyed look. I rushed to explain why I had laughed. “Sorry, sorry. It’s just that, you know, it’s not like there’s any way you wouldn’t know that short hair isn’t girly. So, it’s just kind of pointless to tell you that it’s not what a girl is supposed to do because…there’s no way you accidently got a guy’s haircut.”

Jean’s eyebrows rose, and then he huffed out a laugh too. 

Being around Jean was like sprinting through a minefield that stretched to the horizon. I knew, at some point, I’d step on a mine. I was going to make him mad. Or he was going to make me mad. And it was going to be awful, but I wanted to – _needed_ to avoid that as long as possible. He mattered to me now. And once someone mattered to me, I –

I couldn’t explain it.

I’d fight a war, all by myself for them, me against an army. I’d go on a suicide mission for them. I’d die for them. 

He became someone who mattered to me faster than anyone I’d ever known, and I didn’t have the slightest idea if I mattered to him. I had to avoid fighting with him until I knew I did. Until I had made myself someone he needed – _wanted_ permanently in his life. 

We reached the parking lot, and slowed to a stop, standing in the center of a handicap spot. Our cars were probably nowhere near each other, and we’d have to separate until we got back to my place. The breeze picked up and blew through Jean’s hair. The sunlight glazed over his pupils, making his irises look solid gold, intense. I tried harder than usual just to breathe. 

“Yeah, well,” he mumbled, “I feel like normal people don’t even realize you can want to be…different. Like, they don’t even realize that not every girl wants to be girly.”

“You mean cis people,” I said.

“What?” 

“People who aren’t trans are cis. They aren’t normal. They’re cis.”

His eyebrows furrowed, as he took this in. Then he wore a grin, which of course only made me grin. I’d have paid to read his mind in that moment. 

“Cis people,” he repeated, “don’t understand.”

“Amen,” I responded, and he laughed. 

…

Once we were at my place, I suddenly remembered that his pony-tail and sports bra were still sitting on the counter in my bathroom. I didn’t want him to walk in there and see them without any explanation as to why I’d kept them. And as I glanced at Jean to tell him, I remembered again why he didn’t need the bra. He was wearing the binder. 

“Hey, how long have you been wearing that binder?” I asked 

“Since you gave it to me. Why?” 

My eyes bulged and my body straightened at his words. “ _What_? You…you’ve worn that for over twenty four hours?”

He looked at me like I was drunk and slurring my speech. “Uh, yeah. Other than to shower. _Why_?”

“Oh my God, dude. You – Fuck this is my fault. I’m so sorry. You can’t wear that thing for more than eight hours.”

‘Why not?”

“Because…it’s not, uh, safe. You could damage your ribs. You – haven’t you had trouble breathing?” To be honest, I wasn’t sure that a binder would harm him the same way ace bandages would, or wearing multiple sports bras that were too small. Still, I knew for a fact that binders weren’t supposed to be worn for more than eight hours.

He shook his head. “Not really.” One hand pressed against his chest, forming a barrier between me and his binder. I knew the feeling. When I first got mine, I didn’t want to take it off either. Fuck breathing. 

“Okay, dude, I know it sucks. I know how much it fucking sucks, but you gotta take it off. I’m serious. I should have told you sooner.”

“Fuck that! I _just_ got it.”

I winced. His face looked more betrayed than it did angry and I knew it was because of me. I reached out to him, then drew my hand back right away. What was I going to do? Force him to take it off? I couldn’t. 

“I know.”

“You don’t – Eren, I can’t even – I _hate_ my chest. When – when I’m not wearing this thing I feel like cutting them off. This – this feels much _safer_ to me.” His hands were gripped tight into his shirt. He had back away from me into my living room wall. He looked like a cornered animal and the sight hurt to see. I stepped back too. It had been so long since my surgery, so long since needing a binder that I had forgotten that when I had worn binders I had had to brace myself to take it off. I’d spend ten minutes trying to calm myself down and remind myself I was a man, just to get in the shower. 

“I know, okay, I know! But you don’t want to have a deformed ribcage either.”

“If I have to pick between a deformed rib cage and having tits, I’m going to pick the deformed rib cage,” he spit.

“Why would you – Nobody’s even here but me! And I don’t give a shit! You know I don’t. I’ve been through it. So why does it matter if I see?” My voice had risen without trying, and I swallowed everything else I was about to say. This was already heating up more than I had ever intended. The minefield came to mind again and nerves fluttered in my stomach. I barely knew Jean. He could turn around and never talk to me again and then…who knew what would happen to him. Who knew what would happen to me. 

“It’s not about you! Why the fuck would it be about you? I don’t give a shit if _you_ don’t give a shit. I’m the one that fucking cares about it. _I’m_ the one that has to look down and see them on _my_ body.”

His words hit me like a smack to the face. He was right, and I should have known because I would have said the same thing when I was eighteen. But for the life of me, I didn’t know what I would have listened to when I was eighteen. I doubted anyone in the world could have convinced me.

I took a deep breath, and put my hands up in defense. “You’re right.”

He didn’t respond. His hand was still fisting his shirt. 

“I won’t tell you to take it off. A lot of trans guys do it. I’m just saying, one day…you aren’t going to have to look down and see them. Not just because you’re wearing a binder, either. You’ll get your surgery, you know, if you want to. Wearing a binder is temporary. But if you fuck up your ribs, they’ll still be fucked up after your surgery. I don’t see why you’re forcing yourself to choose when a few years down the road you won’t have to anymore.”

His expression softened a bit. “I want the surgery.” 

“Then you might as well keep your ribs intact until then…”

A moment passed before he nodded. He strode to my bathroom and I jumped, remembering why this subject was brought up to begin with. 

“Look, uh, when you came over yesterday we forgot to get rid of your hair…your bra is in there too.”

In the hall, he pushed the ; door open to see the two items sitting on the counter right where I’d left them. 

“You kept my hair?” he asked.

I blushed. “I thought you might want to get rid of it yourself.”

He faced me then, with an amused expression. “It’s just hair.”

Yeah, I knew that, but it didn’t feel like just hair. It felt like the first milestone along his journey to becoming a man. It was symbolic. At least, it was to me. And I thought it was to him too, by the way he spoke about the permanence of cutting his hair. Before we’d taken him to the hair salon, he didn’t seem to think he’d cut it. 

“Well, whatever. Do what you want with it. I just thought you should do it.”

He slid his shirt off so that he was wearing just his binder. I tried so hard not to stare at his stomach but ended up glancing anyway. His stomach was smooth now, defined but not chiseled. I imagined a blond happy trail spreading across his naval. Then I looked away, because I thought I might drool.

Jean stared at me for a moment, purposefully, like he was waiting for something. When I gave him a confused expression, he looked me up and down pointedly, then at the door.

“Oh, fuck – sorry,” I mumbled as I slipped out of the doorway so he could shut it. 

When he stepped back out, part of me was saddened, because yesterday I’d seen him go in with the bra on and come out with the binder on – he’d been so thrilled. Now it was the polar opposite. With the binder in his hand and his chin high so he could avoid seeing his chest in his periphery, he looked hopeless. 

“You can put it back on tomorrow before school,” I told him.

“I can hardly wait.” 

In order to change the subject I asked, “You gonna throw your hair away?” 

He turned around to catch sight of his hair still sprawled out on the counter, tied off by the hairband. “Actually, I was thinking…do you have, like, a fire-pit or something to burn it in?”

… 

Jean and I stayed in my apartment until the sun began to droop before we walked out to my apartment complex’s lawn. It wasn’t quite dark enough yet that we couldn’t see. The air had cooled quite a bit, but at least it was bug-free. In front of us was my apartment complexes fire-pit. The landlords didn’t actually allow any tenants to own a fire-pit, so they had several spread out across the property. 

The fire had died down, but a few flames still flickered. Sparks burst into the air only to be carried off by the wind, creating a sparkly trail. Of course, Jean’s eyes reflected the flame like that was their sole purpose. The fire glowed I supposed, but his eyes shone so bright. 

While Jean had sat in a nearby lawn chair, I had gathered some kindling. The fall leaves that had fallen and the dead limbs that hung from trees crackled as the fire consumed them. The landlords provided anyone with firewood too, and I’d tossed in a couple logs once I had a few determined flames. 

Once that was done, Jean had stood, holding his hair in his hands. His fingers threaded through it a few times, twisting the strands. A few stray hairs caught in the breeze. 

“Any last words?” I asked.

He huffed out a laugh. “This doesn’t feel like my hair anymore.” Then, without theatrics, he tossed his pony-tail in the fire. It burst in bright light before disintegrating into ash, far faster than the leaves or twigs had. Smoke wafted off of the pit in thick waves. Jean slumped back into his lawn chair.

…

After spending a couple hours by the fire, night eventually chilled the air. We retreated inside. Now, sitting on my couch, Jean paged through my old journals like he had the day before. Sitting beside him, I sipped at a mug of coffee I’d made earlier. My laptop was flipped open on my coffee table while Jean read my journals. His fingers spread over the lines on each page with the care of a priest holding a bible. I couldn’t imagine what my journals were making him think. All I knew was that when I was first discovering myself, I would have done anything to be able to read the thoughts of someone who had already gone through it. Maybe that would have made me feel less scared. 

“Have you written anything?” he asked, still skimming the pages. 

I sipped at my coffee. I’d been working on other homework instead. “No. I feel like I know nothing about you. Where’s your journal? Why don’t I get to cheat?”

Jean snorted. “I never kept any. I could barely admit it to myself, let alone write about it.”

I contemplated what he’d said for a moment. Personally, I had always known. It was like something was always screaming it through a microphone at the back of my head, _you’re a boy, you’re a boy, you’re a boy…_ on and on, endlessly. It had been exhausting. In my dreams, I was always a male. When I played videogames I chose a male avatar. When the gym teacher asked us to split up, or a teacher asked to sit in boy-girl-boy order, they always had to ask me to go to the girl’s side or sit between two boys. 

When I was really young, I remembered I’d gone somewhere with my dad. I was too young to go into the restroom on my own. If I went in alone no one could keep an eye on me. So my dad had let me use the men’s restroom when I was about four or five. He had asked me why it was so exciting for me to go in there. The next part, I couldn’t remember. My dad had told me the story when I was much older. Apparently, I answered his question with, “Because I’m s’posed to use this bathroom.” My dad had laughed this off, and almost immediately explained, “But I think you meant ‘because I’m _not_ supposed to use this bathroom’. You liked getting in trouble whenever you could.”

I hadn’t thought about that memory in years. My chest ached and my ears longed to hear my dad’s voice again. 

I shook my head, trying to shake off the memory. It took a moment to remember why I’d even thought of that. “So, what made you stop lying to yourself?” I asked Jean. 

Jean tilted his head back, presumably to think, which was adorable. Then he slumped back into my coach and laced his fingers behind his head. He was _really_ catching on quick to masculinity…either that, or it was more natural for him than I had realized. 

“Well, it was kind of like getting run over by a train.”

I snorted. “What?” 

“Like…say you’re standing on railroad tracks. And in the distance you see the locomotive heading your way, and it’s really far away and really small. You _know_ it’s there, and at the same time, it’s not. The train’s farther down the tracks than you. But eventually, it gets closer, and louder, and harder to ignore. And then it just… _hits_ you,” he clapped his hands together for emphasis, “So it was like, I always knew, but it also hit me all at once.” 

I smiled, and even chuckled. “You’re such a writer.”

He scoffed and shook his head. “Okay, yeah. But it’s the truth. Like, all these little things happened. I remember once being out with a few guy friends – I never hung out with girls much, I didn’t know how to talk to them. Anyway, I was with these guys. It was the middle of the night. We were like, sixteen, bored as shit, and too young to do anything fun. So we were just driving around, but we’d been just driving around for like three hours. Then one of my friends tells us he has to piss. And so I say, you know, ‘okay, find a gas station.’ And I remember they all looked at me like I was from another planet. They ended up pulling over in an alley somewhere. My friend jumped out, pissed in the alley, and got back in the car.”

Jean swallowed. His eyes wandered around my apartment, almost like he was trying to avoid picturing the memory. He focused to closely on my stacks of movies, and the pictures hung up of my family. His fingers played with loose threads on my couch cushion. 

I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to remember. Somehow, the story didn’t sit right with me.

“It was just a really stupid, little thing. So, I couldn’t figure out why I was upset about it. Like, yeah, guys could pee standing up. Big deal. It’s not like I didn’t know that. But I remember them talking about it after…I think one of them said something about how annoying it must be to be a girl. At first I thought that was why I was mad: I was mad because I was the only girl in the car and being around three guys made me an outsider. They were always assholes to me because of it too. But later, it hit me that the reason I was upset was because I was jealous. I couldn’t pee standing up. Which…at the time, sounded like a really ridiculous thing to be jealous of. But now I get it.”

I nodded as he spoke. His reason for being upset was the same reason it didn’t sit right with me. I knew trans guys figured out ways to pee standing up. They had packers and stuff to wear that made it possible. But the one time I’d tried it I’d made a mess of myself all over my leg. After that, I just figured that it didn’t matter to me enough to risk humiliating myself in public. I could use a stall. Obviously sitting down never did anything to help me feel manly, but now I had enough validation from my appearance and voice that I didn’t mind so much. 

“What else?” 

Jean turned to face me. He sighed and pursed his lips as he thought about it. “Just feeling like I was missing out on stuff that I should want to miss out on? Guys complained about getting hard in class. Getting kicked in the nuts. Getting blue balls. And I was always sorta pissed I wasn’t part of that and couldn’t figure out why.”

“I’m still happy I’m not part of that,” I responded and Jean laughed.

“I was always really pissed about having ‘girl problems’ too. Every period made me hate everything. I was in the worst mood for days. I hated shaving. The only time I ever did it was when my mom noticed and reminded me that no guy would ever want me if I didn’t. I hated bras. Every time there was a special occasion, I had to wear high heels and a dress. That sort of made me want to set myself on fire. But, I think I just figured every girl hated that shit. I mean, who wouldn’t? It fucking sucks.”

I gulped back the rest of my coffee. It had gotten cold, since I’d been sipping at it for over an hour. “I get that,” I said, “All of it.” 

“But I think what made it really _hit_ me was a couple years ago. I had been dating this guy for a long time, but I don’t know if I would say it was ever serious. It’s…kind of hard to be in a serious relationship when the person you’re with has no clue who you are, you know?”

He turned to face me. His eyes were earnest, and there was some mark of pain in the tightness of his expression. I got the sense that this was hard for him to say. Desperately, I wanted to have something to add. Something that would comfort him, let him know I could relate to this too. But I couldn’t, because I’d never been in love with anyone but him. And he knew me. 

So I said nothing, and Jean’s eyes turned away. He looked embarrassed, but kept going. “Anyway, we went out one night. I was always the D.D, because…I guess I was always terrified I’d get drunk and say something I wasn’t ready for people to know. So I stayed sober. But he didn’t…and we stepped out of the bar and he, uh…”

Now Jean was _really_ blushing. His hands gripped on to his pants like a crutch. He wouldn’t look at me. In the span of a few seconds he’d probably blinked ten times.

“See…we’d been dating for, like, six months and we’d never….you know.”

I did know, so I nodded.

“He never acted like it bothered him. He never said anything. But it must have, because he got drunk and he just…it was so early in the morning. We stayed at that bar for so long. All his friends had gone home. And we stepped outside to go home too and he just…”

I winced, as the blurry image of what he was describing came into focus. As if on reflex, I jerked forward where I was sitting on the couch to hold his hand. If I could, I’d yank him right out of that memory.

“You don’t have to say it,” I said, almost like I was begging.

He didn’t pull his hand away. “He didn’t…get to. He didn’t do it. He tried to, but…I started fighting back and…While I was fighting back, I felt, I don’t know…like a man. Standing up for myself. Not being the victim, or the damsel in distress or whatever. And then some random guy who stepped out of the bar saw us fighting, figured out what was going on…and right away he pulled me away from my boyfriend and told me that I was really brave for fighting but that he’d handle it. He told me to go back inside and call someone to come get me. I didn’t bother telling him I’d driven, in my car. Because I knew…I was just a girl again. And when it was that late at night, that’s what girls had to do. After he’d beaten my boyfriend to a pulp, he walked me to my car. He told me not to go to my boyfriend’s place. Go somewhere safe.”

Jean was quiet for a moment. I held on to his hand, praying to God it would be enough. His face was paralyzed, wearing one sickened expression as he stared at his other empty hand. It balled into a fist, then relaxed again. He shoved it into his pocket.

“I went to my mom’s house. I’d been staying at my boyfriend’s place a lot. All my shit was there. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew I’d never talk to my boyfriend again. On my way home, I cried. I cried a fuck-ton. But the fucked up thing was, I didn’t cry because of what almost happened to me. I didn’t cry because I knew that my boyfriend and I weren’t together anymore and that I’d lost him. I didn’t even cry because I knew I’d never go back for my shit at his house, and that I’d lose all the money I’d saved and all my clothes I’d paid for. I cried because I knew if I had been a man, none of that would have happened to me. If I had been a man, I could have protected myself. But I probably wouldn’t have needed to. And if I had been a man, it could have been _me_ that helped some defenseless girl from her drunk boyfriend…”

Jean paused. His expression look frustrated and he pinched the bridge of his nose. 

“I know that a lot of girls go through that and when it happens…they probably think all the same things. They probably think well if I had been a man that wouldn’t have happened. If I’d been a man there’d be no need to fight back, or whatever. But…it was different. I wasn’t just pissed because of how unfair it was because I was a girl. It was like…the whole time I was like _but this isn’t supposed to happen to me_. I know that sounds bad, God. I don’t mean it’s supposed to happen to girls. But…I felt like I was supposed to be the guy that walked out of the bar and stopped some guy from hurting some girl. So… I think it was that night, I stopped lying to myself.”

When he stopped talking, he turned his head to look at me, as if he’d just realized he was in my apartment. Then he glanced at our hands, still clinging to each other, as if it wasn’t his hand at all. He squeezed, and let go. 

“I wouldn’t have asked if I had known,” I said, worried I’d upset him. If it had been me, I’d have been upset. But Jean just shook his head and sighed.

“It’s okay. It wasn’t then, but it is now.”

“I won’t write about that.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I wouldn’t.” He leaned forward in his seat. His hands returned to the pages of my journal. A minute or so passed, and I began typing on my computer. Only the original pieces of his self-realization, of course, because I couldn’t bear the thought of typing out the last story. Even hearing it felt like I was intruding in his memories where I didn’t belong.

“What about you?” he asked.

“What about me what?”

“When did it hit you? When did you stop lying to yourself?”

“Have you read, like, any of that?” I pointed at my journal. If he had, he should know.

“Well, yeah, but I’m guessing I’d have to read the whole thing front-to-back to answer my question. Or you could not be annoying and just tell me.” He smirked and I rolled my eyes. 

I shrugged. “I always knew. If we’re going to use your cheesy train metaphor, than I was being run over by the train since I was old enough to talk.”

Jean snorted. “Well shit.”

“Yeah. You’re gonna have to ask something else.”

“Okay, fine. I’ve been, uh, wondering this for a while. You told me you don’t regret doing anything you’ve done. Your hormones and surgery and stuff. But did you ever…think you would? I mean, did you hesitate?”

By the way he asked, I knew he wasn’t simply curious. The reason he’d asked me this was because he was having this issue himself. So many of the changes I’d made were irreversible, and choosing to live my life as a trans man had made my life so different than I would have ever imagined growing up. Transitioning was a huge, life-changing, irreversible decision. And cold feet shouldn’t be taken lightly. 

“Just once,” I started. “After my dad died, I didn’t doubt it for second. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I swear I would have done just about anything besides sell my soul to get it done as soon as possible. But one time, right when I was about to begin hormone therapy, I did.” 

...

_The rain had finally died down. Standing under the drug store roof’s overhang was no longer necessary. Really, it wasn’t necessary even in the rain. I wasn’t going to melt._

_Yet, I couldn’t make myself walk across the street, to where my car was parallel parked. I knew if I got in the car, and drove home, I’d stick this syringe in my ass and there’d be no going back._

_My hand cradled the vial of testosterone, and gripped on to the syringe still wrapped in a plastic wrapper. I was literally holding my manhood in my hands. My identity, my_ life _was inside of this vial._

_My hands were shaking._

_How did people do this? If I was really going to inject myself with this, really going to transition, that meant that I would have to give up everything. My girlfriend. My home. My state. My Church. My_ mom _. My sister, and my best friend,_ Mikasa. _The decision was irreversible. Every change was permanent. It was the decision between the people I love, the place I belong, and_ who I am. _Once I made my decision, I couldn’t turn back. How did people do this?_

_My hands gripped on to my fragile masculinity as I leaned against the brick wall of the drugstore, still unable to make myself get in my car._

_It wasn’t too late to change my mind. My prescription had been filled this time, but I didn’t have to refill it. I didn’t have to pick it up. My doctor would wonder where I went but who cared about him? He barely cared about me. And my therapist was even worse. I’d avoid seeing him in the afterlife if I could, I hated him so much. Every connection I had to this part of who I was I could turn away from without even looking over my shoulder to see it shrink in the distance. This was the part of my life I was used to tucking away and ignoring. I was the master of neglecting who I was. If I could just make myself do it forever, I could keep my family._

_My dad_ just died. _Mom had_ no one _but Mikasa and me. I couldn’t leave Mikasa to do it all by herself. That wasn’t fair, she had a life to live too and helping mom get through the day was sucking the life out of us. Sometimes the only reason we could stand helping her was because we could complain to each other each night about it. Or rather, I could complain and she could tell me that grief wouldn’t last forever,_

_And if I left them, I was alone. If I was alone, did it really matter if I was finally living as myself?_

_My knees felt like toothpicks buckling under the weight of the rest of me. My heart was racing, but the harder it beat the heavier it felt. My breaths were short. The air was humid, but it was more than that. It felt like the air was being vacuumed from my lungs._

_I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave them behind. I couldn’t be alone._

_A choking sound climbed out of my throat as I slumped to the pavement, sobbing. I covered my face and dropped the vial and syringe on the ground._

_Even in this state, even as I realized that I would have to live the rest of my life in this body, my head jerked up to make sure the vial didn’t shatter against the sidewalk. It hadn’t._

_Just as I was about to reach for the vial, I heard the sound of someone stepping in a puddle and cursing. When he spoke up, I knew he was a man. He muttered about how disgusting the streets were after it rained under his breath._

_I glanced up, all too distracted now to wallow in my misery._

_It only took a glance to see that the reason he’d ended up stepping in the puddle was because he crossed the street in a rush. He’d done that so that he could reach me, since I’d fallen to the ground choking on my own breaths._

_He stood in front of me, looking down. His pale arm reached out, and I took his hand. He helped me heave myself up. Then he bent down to pick up the vile and syringe. He didn’t even glance at the label as he placed it in my hand._

_Now that I was standing up, I had to look down at him. He was quite a bit shorter than me, shorter than I had known any cis man to be. His black hair was cut into a slick undercut. Some of his bangs fell into his eyes. Rain water dripped down his pale cheeks. His eyes were gray, thinly-slit like Mikasa’s – although he was definitely white, and surrounded by hallow purple half-moons. While his face was stern, his face was round, like mine. Other than the stubble, his features were soft. The contrast was so absurd all I could do was stare._

_He arched one thin eyebrow at me._

_“Are you alright?” he asked._

_“Yeah,” I rasped. “Yeah, sorry. I probably freaked you out.”_

_He shook his head. “I’m used to it.”_

_I didn’t know what he meant, so I just nodded. I was about to thank him, head to my car with the vial so that I could contemplate my decision on my kitchen floor at home, when he spoke up._

_“Listen, I know what you’re going through. I can’t tell you what the right decision is. I know that everyone important to you hopes you throw this shit away and that you never think about it again. But I also know, it’s not that easy. It’s nearly impossible to give it up. You want it to be easy, you want to stop thinking about it. You wish you’d never even thought about it. But you can’t help it, because it gives you something that nothing else can. And somehow, for a little while, it makes everything awful in your life worth it.”_

_While he spoke, his jaw was almost clenched. He looked me in the eyes the entire time. He still hadn’t pulled his hand away from mine. His fingers were still curled around the vial. I was amazed how clear my situation was to him, how obvious it was that I had been internally debating whether or not to do this._

_“I can’t tell you which decision is best. You could trust the people who hope you choose not to do it, or trust yourself, and the results could be awful either way. All I can do is tell you to go with your gut. Choose the decision that you think you won’t regret.”_

_He was silent, and his hand pulled away from mine, leaving the vial and the syringe in my hand. My fingers curled around them. His body started to turn away, but I couldn’t let him leave just yet._

_“Wait,” I blurted. He turned to face me again. He didn’t look impatient. “What do I do if I regret it?”_

_“You’ll have to live with it for a while. But at some point, you’ll understand that regret is preventing you from learning. You can’t live your life reminding yourself all the time what you did wrong. If you do that, you’ll never move forward. You have to let it go, and never make the mistake again. It will all be easier once you remember that when you made the decision you did what you thought was best. You did all you could.”_

_As he spoke this last part, he no longer looked me in the eyes. His eyes drifted off, seeing something that only he could._

_“What did you decide?” I asked._

_He almost smiled, I thought. His lips were tighter. I saw something more in his eyes, something glazed over them, something like peace. When he looked my way again, it was gone and in its wake his expression was harsh and formal again. “I trusted the people I love, and quit. I’m a sponsor now.”_

_Without much success, I tried to control my shocked expression. He had no idea what my vial was filled with, what I would use the syringe for. “You think that’s what’s best?” I asked, even though I knew we were talking about two different things now._

_He shrugged. “I told you, I can’t tell you what’s best. I did what was best for me, and I try to help anyone that thinks it’s best for them. But not everything is that simple. Some people are miserable either way.”_

_Before I could ask him if he was still miserable, if he had regrets, or hell, what his name was, the rain poured down in thick sheets. He cursed again, and ran like the police were after him out of sight._

_I finally ran to my car and leapt in the driver’s seat. Once I was home, I filled the vial with the correct dosage. I replayed his words in my mind:_ Choose the decision that you think you won’t regret. _Then I jabbed myself with the needle, and felt the testosterone seep into my body._

_Within in minutes, I swear, I could feel it rushing through my veins, making a man out of me._

...

When I was done speaking, Jean just stared at me wide-eyed with my journal in his lap. “Why didn’t you write about that guy in here?” He tapped the cover of my journal.

I sighed. “I wrote the story a dozen times. I always end up writing a ton of drafts for it, never getting to the point that I can call it a final draft. I’ll probably write it until I die and still never get it right.”

“You told it to me just fine,” he said.

I smiled. “I told you what happened. But I wanted people to live it. I want them to feel how I felt when they read it and…I can’t.”

“I’ve been there.”

“I’m there now,” I spit, “With you and this assignment.”

He laughed and smirked at me again like he’d never go easy on me. But then, as he opened up the journal again and turned to the chapter dedicated to the early stages of my transition, he asked, “So, that guy wasn’t trans.”

“Not that I know of.”

Jean’s eyes met mine and he searched my expression. He must have been able to tell the subject made me slightly uncomfortable. “He said he was a sponsor?” 

“Yeah. I think he meant he was sponsor for drug users – or, past drug users.”

Jean’s eyebrows shot up. A shiver ran down my spine, just thinking about that man again. I hoped wherever he was, he hadn’t gone back on his decision to quit. Something about him had been hard to look at…like his past was lurking on the back of his ankles closer to him than even his shadow, and if I’d squinted a little more I’d be able to see it grin back at me. The pinch in his eyes was like he was always trying to shove one memory or another out of his brain. He looked much older than he must have been. What had happened in his past life had forced him to age more than time passing by had. All of this about him had become hard to ignore in just a few minutes of talking to him. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to _be_ him.

“After he saw me collapse…I mean, I was totally losing my shit…He must have thought I was on heroine. Or that I was…I don’t know, trying to quit. Going through withdrawals or something.” I was pretty sure that was the drug people most often shot up with a syringe. I didn’t know for sure, of course. My life had never had time to waste on any of that, not that I blamed him. Everything about him, despite looking so strong, whispered _victim_. “When he realized I wasn’t high or something, he must have figured out that I couldn’t decide if I wanted to take it or not. Only, he thought it was for drugs, not transitioning.” 

“But he still made you decide to transition?” 

I nodded. “He was talking about something else but he’d faced everything I’d had to.”

Jean’s hands traced the edges of my journal. His eyes darkened as he focused on the cover print. He traced every single letter. He kept opening his mouth and shutting it. Finally, he leaned back in the seat again and stared at my ceiling as he spoke. “I don’t know if I can do it. My mom…she wouldn’t kick me out, but I think it would kill her. I can’t do that to her.”

“Jean…look, no one told me this, and it wouldn’t have changed my mind but…You don’t ever _have_ to. You can still be a man and never transition.”

He turned his head to face me. “But the only people who should be choosing not to do it are the people who don’t want to. I want to. I’ve never wanted anything so bad. Now that I know it’s even possible it’s like…It’s all that’s ever going to matter.”

I swallowed, wishing I had something I could say that would change his mind. But I knew it wouldn’t happen. Not when he felt like there was nothing else to live for. 

“You don’t have to do it right now. You can wait until you’re ready.”

He shook his head. “I already told you how I feel about ‘ready’.”

“Then I’ll help you do it now. It’s easier to do it if you’re not alone.”

At this, Jean laughed. He leaned much closer to me than I was expecting. I tried not to breath. His eyelids were droopy. I hadn’t realized how late it was getting. He hadn’t had coffee when I had. 

“You haven’t even told your own family.”

“I’m not like you. I wait until I’m ready.”

“No, you don’t. You’d still be at home if you had waited until you were ready. Ready doesn’t matter to you either. You’re actually just waiting for _them_ to be ready and…you don’t think that’s ever going to happen.”

I jerked away from him. “The fuck I am. Telling them I’m trans scares the fuck out of me. But them? They don’t give a shit. They aren’t at home right now wondering when they’re going to have to disown me. They don’t have anything to be ready for because they don’t have to think about it until it’s already happened. I’m not ready.”

“Bullshit,” Jean snapped. My eyes eyes widened. “Not being ready wouldn’t fucking stop you. Since I’ve met you, I’ve learned one thing about you and that’s that you’ll risk anything to get what you want as soon as possible. You’re just like me, Eren. Except for me, I choose to do what I’m not ready to do…and you do it without thinking.”

I shook my head. Jean smiled because he thought he was catching me in a lie. And honestly, he might be right about my choosing to transition – because I took off from home and didn’t even consider the consequences of transitioning until the vile of testosterone was in my hand, he might be right about why I hadn’t told my family I was trans yet – because I constantly feared that my mom would mourn me the way she’d mourned my dad, but he didn’t know that there was still something I hadn’t done because I wasn’t ready to do it yet – kiss him.

“You’re wrong,” I said, “You’re so fucking wrong.”

He grinned at me. He leaned even closer to me, so that he could look me in the eyes. He was so certain of himself in that moment I had to lean away from him, catch my breath. I could feel the heat of his skin against mine. His hand had brushed against my thigh. I didn’t think he noticed. 

“Fine, then. If I’m wrong, then do whatever you haven’t done yet, right now. Whatever you’re not ready to do, _do it now_. I bet you anything you can’t.” 

I hesitated, and Jean’s grin became outright devilish. He thought the reason I had done nothing was because I had nothing I wasn’t ready to do. He had expected me to do nothing. He really believed that right now, the reason I hadn’t done anything _wasn’t_ because even after his dare I still wasn’t ready and couldn’t get passed that. 

And I just –

Fucking _hated_ the idea of letting him win. 

But at the same time, when I looked past his condescending smirk, and thought about how much I still had to learn about him, and the minefield I was running through, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kiss him right now and risk ruining everything. If he reacted negatively, he might not ever speak to me again. Whatever potential we had, friendship or more…I was already so dependent on it. He had something I’d never found in anyone else, something that made my life vivid. 

A minute had passed, and with it the opportunity. 

“See,” Jean whispered, “There’s nothing you’re not ready to do.”

Swallowing my pride tasted awful, but I did it. “I guess you’re right.”

He smiled, and opened his mouth to say something more, when something started vibrating. He shifted around in his seat, before reaching into his pocket and pulling out his phone. 

“It’s my mom,” he explained, “She’s probably wondering where I am.”

I nodded at him to answer the phone. He hand slid across the screen so that he could. 

“Hey,” he started, “I’m doing homework with someone from school…yeah, Eren, the one from writing…I didn’t realize how late is…yeah, I’ll be home soon…Okay. Love you, bye.”

He stuffed his phone back in his pocket. 

My chest felt like it was filled with air. His mom had already heard of me. I could float right off the fucking couch. 

“I should get going,” he said. Even though I’d heard him say it on the phone, I was still a little surprised and disappointed that he was actually going. My house had never felt empty before I knew him. Now, whenever he left it felt huge and barren. My bed felt cold. 

“Yeah, okay,” I said, doing my best to sound indifferent. 

As he stood up, he ran his fingers through his hair and faced me. “I uh, I know…I’m already asking a lot of you but…”

I perked my head up. I was sure I looked much too eager. Even my pulse spiked. “Yeah?”

“Do you have something else I can wear tomorrow? It’s just – I really don’t have the time or the money to shop until this weekend and –”

“Yeah, whatever you want,” I blurted.

He looked at me like he was worried and I forced my shoulders to relax. Acting like I didn’t care when I really, _really_ cared was getting tiring.

“Okay…Thanks.”

He followed me into my room. I opened the closet up. Gesturing to it with a waving motion, I said, “Whatever you think will fit.”

“You sure?” He looked at me, still wearing that worried expression. Somehow I knew he really did feel bad for taking my clothes. He wasn’t just taking advantage of me. I nodded at him. Then, he carded through my various hanging shirts until he found a gray T-shirt that buttoned at the top. When he turned around to face me where I was sitting on my bed, I was already pointing at my dresser where I kept my pants. He opened the top drawer, and immediately shut it. All my boxers were in there. He looked embarrassed, but continued to the next drawer. He grabbed a faded pair of jeans. 

“Really,” he said, “I mean it when I say thank you.”

“I know.”

We left my bedroom and got all the way to my front door before I remembered. “Shit. Wait a sec.”

I darted back into my living room. On the floor was his binder. He’d dropped it there earlier. I scooped it up and headed back to where he was waiting at the door. 

“Oh, right,” he said, “I can’t believe I forgot it already.”

I smiled. As I handed it to him our fingers brushed. I swore his hand lingered there, but I could be feeling what I wanted to feel. “Eight hours,” I reminded him.

He nodded. Just as he was pushing my screen door open, he paused. “See you tomorrow?” he asked. 

“Yeah, text me whenever.” I could have begged. It was an effort not to say please.

“Sorry, I just…I like talking to you.” 

I almost reached out to him. Who had made him feel like he had to be sorry for wanting to talk to somebody? Who had made him feel like he was a burden to be around? Was it me? My blood heated at the thought. I’d spend the rest of the night replaying our day, trying to figure out what I’d done if I had. 

“Don’t be sorry, dude. I’d have kicked you out if I didn’t like talking to you too.” 

He laughed. “Somehow, I don’t think you’re exaggerating.”

“I’m not. Maybe you haven’t noticed but I’m not exactly polite.”

As Jean stepped out the door, he was smiling and shaking his head. “Could have fooled me.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, Jean becomes a different kind of rider, Eren and Jean make it pour, and the two of them decide they might believe in fate. <3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for being so patient with me everyone!

Jean leaned against the guardrail of my balcony, gazing through the bars toward the apartment complexes. His slouched, knees spread, hair ruffled, and one hand tapping his pencil against his notebook. My glances were quick, too brief. I wanted to keep looking at him, to watch him the way he watched the world around him. Today he looked comfortable in his skin. He looked like he wasn’t thinking about how a man would sit, how a man would tap his pencil, or how he’d look at an apartment building. He was just being Jean, and although I saw him as the man he was the moment I learned his secret, today I thought I might have seen him that way without having to know. 

I wouldn’t ever tell him, but I liked seeing him like this more. He could be arrogant, grumpy, rude, skeptical, insecure, proud, and a number of other things when he wasn’t trying to be masculine but once he was trying to be it was like he became one indifferent mannequin. He’d probably figure out a balance later, a way to be himself and also be the man he wanted to be. But right now, I liked being the only person in the world who’d ever seen him be himself. 

“Can’t think,” he said. His paper was covered in scribbles. “Can’t figure out how I want to start.”

“Writer’s block?” 

“Not exactly. I’ve been…I started a journal. Now that I know who I am and can’t lie to myself about it I…I liked that you could look back on it all from where you are now.”

Hearing him talk like that made me smile. I wondered what he wrote about. How many times was my name written in there? What words surrounded it? I’d do anything to read it. “One day after you transition you’ll read it and you won’t be able to believe how far you’ve come.”

“Yeah?”

I shrugged, trying to play it off like what I’d said didn’t mean anything deeper, but it did. I’d reread my journals from years ago, at the beginning of my transition, and couldn’t believe I’d ever felt that way. I’d ever been so hopeless, so angry, so defeated, so hateful. I couldn’t believe how scared I was of transitioning. Well, not of transitioning exactly. Scared I’d transition and hate the results, or that they wouldn’t make me feel any more like the man I was. 

“Yeah. So keep it up. You’ll thank yourself later,” I said.

“I will.” 

He tapped his notebook with his pencil harder now, breaking the lead on the page and cursing under his breath. Something told me he had something on his mind, but he was the furthest thing from an open book. Sometimes I considered people to be walking stories, like everyone was a book and what kind of book they were, and how many pages it had, and whether it was fiction or non-fiction, if it was old or new, hardcover or paperback and so on, all determined who they were in my mind. Jean was a diary through and through, with a lock that needed a key and everything. The pages inside were dated, but not every page was written on, and others only had a few ambiguous words. His pages were frayed, but not torn, and the lines and dates were embossed with gold ink. The writing was written entirely in inscrutable cursive. 

“Have you written anything?” he asked.

I had, but I didn’t know if I liked it. 

I wrote:

_My hair burned, every blond strand that had taken years to grow was nothing but ashes in seconds. Long after it became nothing but a memory, I still watched the flames flicker in the air. I thought it would be hard to let go of, because I’d had it so long. This haircut was such a permanent change. But now that I could run my fingers through the buzzed hair at the base of my neck, it wasn’t hard at all. That long hair belonged to someone else, someone I no longer – never really – was._

Although I liked the paragraph itself, and I liked the idea of starting my story with present-day Jean reflecting on past-Jean, I knew that if I turned this in it would give Jean away. Everyone in the class would know I was talking about him. I couldn’t exactly avoid peer-editing or reading it aloud if the teacher asked me to. 

On my laptop, I saved the document and exited out of Word right after.

“Haven’t written anything right,” I answered him now. 

“I just need, like, to take a break,” he said. His eyes wandered back to the apartment complexes, then to the trees along the pathway leading to the parking lot. The leaves were curling up in the icy blue autumn chill, and in an act of defiance each leaf blushed, turning red and rose gold, glowing in the yellow sunshine to make my neighborhood just that much warmer. 

“You need to take a break from not-writing?” I clarified, wearing a smirk.

He rolled his eyes. “Uh, yeah, actually, I do. I need to clear my head.”

“Okay,” I said, standing up and sliding my glass door open.

“Where are you going?” he asked. He shoved his notebook, pencil, earphones and eraser in his backpack all at once, and they all crunched together inside before he zipped it up.

“Come on. Let’s go clear your head.”

“Where?”

“You tell me.” As I spoke, I slipped on my shoes and Jacket. While waiting for him to come up with somewhere to go – since this was a snap-decision I’d made without even thinking, because just the idea of us hanging out together without the pretense of working on our stories sent a thrill through every nerve of my body – I plugged my laptop into my charger before setting it on my desk. Then, I shoved my wallet, keys, and phone into my jacket pockets. I’d gotten ready before Jean had even stood up. Now I faced him, wearing an expression like get-going. 

He scrambled to get up, and tossed his backpack on my couch. “We’ll be back later, right?”

Damn right we would. I nodded at him.

Jean slipped on his shoes and jacket just like I did, and headed for my door. I placed a hand on his shoulder, stopping him midstride.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“The car. It’s the place I go to think.”

“That’s helpful.” 

He grinned at me, devilishly, and I remembered how little I cared where we were going and wondered why I acted like I did to begin with. Jean could tell me he bought tickets to Costa Rica and I’d say, “Let me pack my bags.”

“Just trust me,” he said, “I’ll drive.”

I trusted him and he drove.

…

Jean was the type of driver that hardly needed to pay attention to his actual driving. He had turned the radio on, low though, so we could still talk if we wanted. He sang the lyrics to songs he knew, and hummed to those he didn’t. His voice was lovely. Not so much talented or worth recording, but something that would make a baby fall asleep before the lullaby had even ended. Something I imagined filling a house he had just moved into, before any electronics were unpacked yet. Something I knew would calm anyone who was stressed, or worried, or anxious about anything after a minute or two. I loved listening to him, and I wondered what he would sound like when he started hormone therapy. Although his voice wasn’t high-pitched, it had the distinct softness and melody of femininity in it that I knew he probably hated. 

His car was clean as if he had just bought it, but broken in nonetheless. The cushions were all indented from other passengers, the cup-holder was filled with change, an air-freshener hung from the rearview mirror, and sunglasses hooked on one of the sun visors. On the floor at my feet was a pile of mail, a folded sweatshirt, and bottle of Gatorade.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Jean turned down the volume. “Whenever I need inspiration, I kind of just…drive around, thinking.”

That didn’t surprise me, somehow. He looked as at home driving as he would lying in a hammock. 

“So, if it’s not writer’s block, why can’t you write about me?”

He rolled his fingers on the wheel like playing a piano, adding thumps one after another to the silence between us like both of our heartbeats. “I think it’s because, I don’t want to make up a story about you. I just – I just want to write about you. Period. I want to write about…us. This week has been…”

A moment passed. “Yeah,” I agreed, without him needing to describe it to me. I knew exactly what his silence meant. As a writer I struggled to find words for every situation I could imagine, so that anyone in the world no matter who they were could understand, could live in that moment I had written just like I had understood and lived it in my head. But Jean and I were something from another universe. I felt that every me there was in every parallel universe there was a me in, had probably felt an absence, an unnamable displacement in his life that he often ignored and could never decipher because he had no idea that he was missing out on Jean because he had no idea Jean existed. I felt so sorry for the rest of the world and universe and existences of all the other unnamed, unmapped everythings that may go beyond the universe that were yet undiscovered, who were all missing out on Jean.

“I think I want to write about us too,” I said, “Just us.”

“And you know…I could make up a lot but…”

“But?”

“I’m starting to think I don’t even want to write fiction,” he said, running his fingers through his hair. The stress was apparent in his face. His eyes were weary, but not as if they needed sleep. More like they needed to read the type of writing that would make him a year younger, charge him up, and keep him up all night without any need to sleep even in the AM. He needed fuel.

“I think I want to write non-fiction. I want to write what’s real. And I want to record my life like you have, but in a way that will make people understand, ya’ know? I want people to read my life and think…”

“That they understand you after all,” I finished for him.

“Exactly.”

“I want to be honest about who I am to people, and they can like it or hate it, I guess. But that’s what I want.”

I found my hand roaming over the middle compartment toward him, but it pulled it back. The two of us were driving toward the sun, sinking lower and lower to the horizon, while clouds in every color floated overhead, overseeing our short adventure. All I wanted to do was hold his hand. Hold his hand, and watch the sun set, and the stars wander, and meet the moon’s eye, and fall asleep together with our heartbeats synchronized, dreaming of each other. Really, that was all I wanted and I didn’t care if it was too much to ask. God had led me to him for a reason. And I had fallen in love with him the moment I saw him because there was no time to waste. We weren’t meant to waste our lives waiting for it to begin.

“Then let’s do it,” I said to him. “Let’s write true stories about our time with each other.”

“The teacher will know. It’ll be so obvious.”

“So what? You’re going to change your major to non-fiction, right?”

His eyebrows shot up like the thought hadn’t occurred to him, and suddenly he needed to focus on the road, as we passed a slow driver in a sedan and just made the yellow light. He turned left, and we were in a quieter neighborhood with fewer businesses, closest to a vast park visited by few.

“I guess so,” he said. 

“Then we should just do it.”

“But you’re still a fiction major, right?” 

I was, but I didn’t care about that right now. The teacher could grade me how she wanted, but if I got a poor grade because my story didn’t follow the prompt correctly, that was fine. How well I wrote mattered to me more than anything else. If I wrote about what I cared about most – by far, more than anything, Jean, already, even after I had only just met him – the writing part would be mind control, forcing me to sit down and type until it was complete, afterward hardly remembering the process or anything I had written at all. 

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him, “What are you going to write about? I mean, what…you know, are you going to tell them about us hanging out?”

Jean smiled and glanced at me. “Feel like it hasn’t happened yet.”

I grinned, but tried not to show how excited that made me feel. Already, so much had happened between us that I wanted to write about. But the thought of anything more happening at all left my fingers itching to get at the keyboard. 

“So, what do you think’s gonna happen?”

“How should I know?”

“I don’t know. Fine. What would you _want_ to happen?”

Jean pressed his lips together before looking away from me, running his hand through his hair again. His eyes focused on the road, far ahead in the distance. He shrugged. “You know. Anything.”

“Oh _come on_. ‘Anything’ is bullshit.”

“Seriously,” he said, “I’d write about anything we did.”

“Okay, but if we really could do _anything_ right now, you’d choose something wouldn’t you? What would you want to do more than anything else?”

He didn’t respond right away. Cars sped past as Jean slowed for a yellow light ahead. All around us were houses, and a preschool usually crowded with kids, parents and teachers shortly after school. They never clogged the road though, because the kids that walked home could walk over a bridge that went from one side of the road to the other. The bridge arched just a few hundred feet ahead of us, but it and the sidewalks on either side of it were barren. The streetlamps illuminated the staircase on one side of it faintly. And the houses neighboring the sidewalk had patio and deck lights lit. 

The sun had begun to set below the horizon behind us. Above us, the charcoal clouds faded downward into dark burgundies and maroons, then rust and nearly gray where the sky met the earth, as if that space didn’t exist and Jean and I could drive into nothingness, never to return. In the very ribcage of the sky lightning flashed, before thunder rocked, breaking the sound of traffic and the radio. But the windshield was clear, and the roads were dry. 

“I just…” he began, and I had nearly forgotten that I had asked him a question. Hell, I didn’t even know what I would do if I could do anything, but I knew it would be with him. Jean continued, “I don’t care what I’m doing. I…want to be transitioned, and I want to be writing, and I want to be with you.”

The words fell out of his mouth, and it was obvious he only noticed them once they’d already been said, because his cheeks flared up and his body tensed. The thoughts were so similar to my own that a shiver ran down my spine, leaving my skin tingling like a livewire everywhere. 

“I mean – I – I didn’t mean – not like that, just, you know. I –”

“I get it.” Even though I didn’t want to, even though for me it _was_ like that, and I didn’t know. The electricity flowing under my skin was doused. 

“I want to already feel like a man,” Jean said, too soon, trying to get passed what had just happened. He wouldn’t look at me. 

“You are,” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “I know. But I don’t feel like one.”

“What would make you feel like one?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. Nothing makes me feel like one. I mean, like, on the outside. Not just…you know.” I did know. 

Before I gave myself time to be ready, before I thought about what a fool I would look like if he didn’t do this, I demanded, “Pull over.”

He whipped his head to look at me. His foot pressed down on the brake, but didn’t quite halt. “What? Why?”

“Pull over,” I repeated, “Right there. At the bridge. Just do it.”

“Why?” he asked. But I didn’t answer him and he didn’t question me. First he looked over his shoulder, then he flipped on his blinker. The car pulled onto the shoulder beside the road, just outside the preschool. 

“Come with me.” I gestured for him to get out of the car. Jean didn’t question me this time. He simply put his flashers on and stepped out. 

We started climbing the stairs up to the bridge. 

“Okay, what the fuck are we doing?” he asked.

“Look, when I first started transitioning, I just – wanted to tell the whole fucking world that I was a man, okay? And I’d tell myself every morning in the mirror. I’d say it over and over until I believed myself, and then I’d say it again.” We strode out into the center of the bridge, at the peak, and I leaned against the fence meant to prevent anyone from falling. Traffic zoomed past underneath us, only their headlights momentarily flashing before they zipped away. 

Jean cocked his head at me. “I think I remember reading something about that in one of your journals.”

I nodded, absently, because he probably had although I couldn’t remember the specific journal or period or day that I’d written it. “Eventually,” I said, “I couldn’t say it enough or loud enough to believe myself.”

Jean arched an eyebrow. His fingers curled in the interlaced wiring of the fence as he stood beside me looking down on the drivers returning home from work or going out of town for their Friday night. The wind blew through his hair and ruffled his clothing. The smell of his minty shampoo, and something else, something that smelled like detergent, and sex, and boy, and everything about him that made me want to pull his shirt off and touch his skin, taste it, and pull him into a dark room, completely overwhelmed me. And then it heightened in some way, richened, mixed with something that I couldn’t quite place.

It was rain, I thought. I smelled rain.

“Yeah?” he asked now.

“Yeah,” I said, “And I asked myself, what kind of man do I want to be?”

“What kind of man was that?” His tone had a hint of amusement in it. By the smirk on his face, I figured he was humoring me, but I didn’t care. He needed this and he’d get it in a second. I couldn’t understand why it had worked for me but it had. 

“I wanted to be the kind of man that didn’t ever doubt myself,” I said, more to myself than him, as a reminder of who I was then and how far I’d come, and how much I couldn’t believe that somehow in the time since I’d had to say this to convince myself, I’d actually become that man. I was him every day of my life now. “Even when everyone else doubted me, I wouldn’t no matter what.”

“Did it work?” he asked.

“Not yet. There’s more,” I said, “You gotta tell me what kind of man you want to be.”

Jean sighed, theatrically so I would know what a burden this was for him. “Do I really have to do that?”

“Yes. Tell me.”

Jean stared off into the traffic for some time. He looked embarrassed, or self-conscious, but after a moment that faded and his features softened. Now he just looked like he really missed something, and couldn’t wait to find it. “I – I want to be _the_ man. I want to be the fucking asshole everyone hates. I want to be the _shit_. The cocky _son of a bitch_. For once, I want to be _that guy_. I’ve put up with it, I’ve dealt with some of the grade-A assholes and now I want it to be _my_ turn.”

“Well, you _are_ the man,” I said, facing him now. 

He deadpanned at me. “Thanks.”

“Dude, don’t question it. You’re the man.”

“Okay, yeah. I’m the man.” He said this just to humor me too, and I shook my head. He needed to trust me. Or at least, do it for himself, just to see, and not just to get me off his back.

“Say it louder,” I said. 

“Say what louder?”

“I’m the man. Say it louder.”

“Fuck no. I’ll feel like an idiot.”

“You want to be the asshole that everyone hates? You want to be full of yourself? Then fucking say it louder.” 

This time, Jean almost looked at me like he understood why I was doing this. He hesitated, rolled his eyes, and then closed them. First he inhaled, and on the exhale he yelled, “I’m the man!” 

“There you fucking go,” I said, patting him on the back. Jean shook his head, but despite himself he smiled. “Now, you want everyone to think you’re a fucking asshole? Then they can suck your dick.”

Jean’s fingers curled tighter in the wire. “That’s what I should tell them. You know, one day. When they give me shit.”

“No, tell them right now. They’re right there.” I gestured to the traffic. “Tell them they can suck your dick.”

“You honestly want me to yell that?” Jean looked exasperated, with slumped shoulders and those same weary eyes that looked like they’d been staring at a bright computer screen in the dark too long. He glanced around at the neighboring houses. We were still alone. 

“You scared?” I asked.

“Hell no. I’m just not yelling that.”

“Fine,” I said, shrugging. “If you won’t, I will.” I cupped both of my hands around my mouth, and at the top of my lungs, like I wanted to say it directly in God’s ear, I screamed, “Suck my dick!” Thunder cracked above my head a moment after as if my word’s had reached God and he was pissed. 

While shaking his head and fighting a grin, Jean said, “Oh my God, you did _not_ just –”

“Yeah, I did.” I put both my hands up in the air like what-you-gonna-do-about-it, and added, “You know…since you’re not man enough to.” 

“Are you really – you fucking asshole.” 

“Well, it’s _true_ , isn’t it?” I said. “You wanted to be an asshole, and now you can’t step up and do it.”

Jean groaned. “God _fuck you_.” He looked away from me, almost like he was going to head back toward the staircase. I saw him glance at his car below. The lights were still flashing on the shoulder. For a moment I was terrified – terrified enough I’d get on my knees and beg him to forgive me – that he was truly pissed off at me. 

But then Jean turned back to face the highway. Like me, he cupped his hands around his mouth. He cleared his throat. I knew it would be hard for him to scream this without his voice raising too high. Keeping his voice deep wasn’t easy at a normal volume, let alone yelling. But he’d decided to do it. Even louder and harder than I had, Jean screamed, “SUCK MY DICK!”

When the lightning flared this time the sky poured to the earth and within seconds Jean and I were completely drenched. The thunder clapping in the heavens made both of us jump, and then I shoved him, grinning so hard my cheeks felt like they were clipped with clothes pins. “Look what you fucking did!” I yelled at him, clapping him on the back. “You fucking made it rain!”

“Shut up,” he said, laughing, and covering his mouth to hide his smile.

“Felt good, didn’t it?” My voice sounded like static in the dark, only flickers of lightning creating light now, like the angels were taking pictures of us from above with the flash turned on. “To stop giving a shit?”

Jean nodded. “I’ve never said that before.”

“You feel like a man yet?” I asked.

Jean huffed out a laugh. His eyes brightened in the darkness and the sight made me ache. “Yeah, actually. I do.” 

I realized how close we’d gotten, now that we couldn’t stray further than a few inches away in order to hear each other and my hand was still resting on his back. Jean looked into my eyes. Lightning bolted in the sky, thunder shook the world, traffic sped underneath us, the bridge trembled, and for a single second in the infinity of time the rain hovered in the air because within that moment, the smallest instant of time, however long it took for synapses to fire and for a nervous system to send a message down a spine right into someone’s fingertips, Jean and I knew exactly what we both wanted to happen, what we both were going to do.

We kissed, and time kick-started around us again. The rain fell harder, the bridge vibrated instead, the traffic rushed into smeared blurs of light, and the thunder boomed, rocking in my chest, as lightning pulsed through the storm clouds above our head, the heartbeat of the clouds, and God, God, _God_ I felt like a motherfucking God.

When we parted, something had shifted irreversibly between us. His fate and my fate had finally crossed, and instead of passing by each other or agreeing to run parallel, his and mine had woven together like a braid. Nothing could unravel us now. 

“We should go back,” he said. “We’re gonna fucking get struck by lightning and die.”

I nodded, but it still took us several long moments to separate from each other’s grasp and head to his car. He held my hand until we were forced to part, him going into the driver’s seat and me getting in the passenger seat. Inside, my clothing stuck to my skin. This time I shivered because of the cold. Jean flipped on the heat but I knew I wouldn’t warm up or get comfortable if I had to remain suctioned to my wet clothes. I peeled off my T-shirt and held it in my lap before turning the fans to face me.

Jean stared at my chest. The jagged scars running across my chest were as apparent and violent in their appearance as the lightning in the sky. But I loved my scars. I only ever hid them because I had to in order to remain closeted. My scars were living proof of what I’d been through, what sacrifices I’d made, how brave I’d been, what I’d been willing to do in order to be the man I needed to be. 

Jean reached out and his fingers trailed along them. Then he glanced at his own chest, and I realized what this was about. He didn’t have any equal warrior’s mark.

“Take off your shirt,” I said.

“What?” he asked, placing his hand against his chest.

“Come on,” I said.

He glanced around him, as if any of the cars passing by in their fleeting moments had bothered to glance our way, and had managed to see through the window. The waterfalls of rain streaming down the windows veiled us from the rest of the world. Our world was as big as the car right now, and frankly it didn’t feel nearly as crowded or unwelcoming.

He took off his shirt and dropped it between his feet. Underneath, he wore nothing but his binder. This too, was soaked right through to the skin, and because it was white, I could see exactly what was underneath it.

His face burned. His arms huddled close to his chest, hiding them. 

“Hey,” I said, reaching for his arm. “Look. It’s flat.”

“Of course it is.” But he looked down anyway, and then he saw what I meant. Even though the binder was drenched and his skin showed through, the binder still flattened his chest. So it didn’t look like he had breasts. It looked like he was sitting shirtless right beside me, flat-chested. Jean’s jaw dropped. His lip quivered. And then his hand ran over the binder.

“This,” he said, “Is what it was always supposed to look like.”

There was nothing else I could do but kiss him again. I had to. And he kissed back. I couldn’t believe how quiet the world was when he kissed me, like the sound of silence between heartbeats. My fingers curled in his.

“Hey, Jean.”

“Hmmm?” 

“Is that really the kind of man you want to be?” 

He thought about it, then said, “Just the one I want people to see.”

“Then who’s the one you want to be?”

“Just myself.” 

My fingers unlaced from his so that I could brush some of his hair off of his forehead. Then I cupped his cheek in one hand. “Does anyone ever get to see him?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

Jean glanced out the window, but he couldn’t possibly see anything through all the pattering against the glass. “If I loved them or not.”

I thought of what he’d been like earlier in the car. How he’d taken back what he’d said about wanting to be with me right away. I’d known since the moment I saw him that somehow I loved him. I’d been capable of loving him, and waiting to love him since the moment I was born and when I saw him I knew that if he gave me the chance sooner or later I’d fall for him, and fall for him endlessly, never touching down again. But maybe a kiss wasn’t anything to him, and maybe he’d kiss anybody. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t think he would, but who knew. 

But I needed to know. More than that, I couldn’t not know just because I was too scared to ask. “Do you think I’ll ever see him?”

He smiled. “You already have.” He ducked in to peck me on the lips. When he parted, he barely pulled away from me. I could still feel his breath on my skin. “You saw him first.”

We kissed until the rain stopped. Until the world was looking back in on us. We both realized that at any moment someone could pull over and ask us what was wrong with our car. An hour, at least had passed since we left my apartment. So he drove us home. Our fingers laced over the middle compartment of his car, and we said nothing but didn’t need to anyway.

...

Night had fallen by the time we got back to my apartment. Inside, Jean and I didn’t bother to write, even though getting out of the house had supposedly been in search for inspiration. I thought that Jean probably had been inspired, probably had some epiphany, but none of it had anything to do with writing. 

We held each other in the doorway, both of us unsure where this was going. Placing my hands on his waist, I pressed his back into the wall to kiss him some more. But even when I leaned in, Jean’s mind was preoccupied. Turning my head, I followed his line of sight to the hallway of my apartment.

“Are we…” he said.

I knew what he was trying to ask. “Only if you want to.”

Facing me again, he swallowed. “I’ve never.”

“I figured,” I responded. “When you told me that story about your ex.”

“No, I mean – I’ve never even, like, I haven’t even –” The words wouldn’t come to him. Jean’s face heated up and I cupped his cheek in my hand, stroking his cheekbone, trying to sooth him. 

“Haven’t even?” 

“Touched, uh.” Again, he stalled, clearing his throat.

And then it hit me, and my eyes widened. “You’ve never even jerked off before?” 

He shook his head. “I just get too, uh…I can’t…My body, it. I don’t know how to say this.”

“Dysphoric,” I said, “You get too dysphoric.”

Jean’s gaze shifted meaningfully, and then he nodded slowly. “That’s what the word means? I saw it in your journal but…”

“Yeah.” I hadn’t realized I’d never explained it to him. But of course I should have. He’d made his dysphoria obvious, even without talking about it. He always looked like he was stuck inside his own cramped skin. Never sitting too comfortably, never walking too confidently, or doing anything distantly. He was always aware of himself. 

“Maybe we shouldn’t –” I started to say, but Jean kissed me.

“I don’t think I can with anyone else,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re the only one who’s going to – to get it.” 

My arms slid around his waist and pulled him tighter to my body. “So you want to?”

He nodded. “Have you uh…have you done this before?”

“Not in a while.” 

“But with a lot of people?” He was so forward with me. I wondered if he was like that with everyone. Somehow, I knew he was but still hoped he wasn’t. I wanted to be special.

I scoffed. “Hell no? No one knows I’m trans except you, so I couldn’t. I had two boyfriends in high school, and a girlfriend, but only for a very short while. When I moved here, I had a thing with another girl but…I barely knew her. She thought I was a girl and we just…had a thing, for a while. Or whatever.” I hadn’t thought about any of them in so long, and didn’t care to either. 

“Do you get dysphoric when you…you know?”

I smiled at his inexperience. “I used to. Now it’s just. I’ve come to terms with it.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay what?”

“I’m going to too.”

Before I could tell him he didn’t have to, or that he had all the time in the world, or that I didn’t come to terms with it until after I’d transitioned as far as I intended to, Jean was kissing me and I wasn’t caring anymore. We stumbled through my apartment toward my bedroom. He was both timid and frantic, hesitating before touching me, then touching me the way he wanted to all at once, all in a rush. 

We fell back onto my bed together. He was clumsy about it. I could also tell he was struggling with What A Man Would Do. He couldn’t quite figure out where to place his hands, if he should lay in between my legs, or straddle me. I kissed him back, trying to settle him into the kiss, even though I could feel his heart smashing against his ribs through his shirt. 

When my hand slid up underneath it, he pulled away, only to peel off the wet fabric. He threw it and it plopped on my bedroom floor. Then went mine. He straddled me now, and he looked a bit uncomfortable doing it. But his fingers trailed along my scars, and I sighed under his touch. My fingers tightened on his hips. No one had touched them before. 

“I’ll have scars, won’t I?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Depends. I had a really big chest. But you don’t.” His chest was actually small enough I thought he might be able to get keyhole surgery instead, which wouldn’t require his surgeons to make long incisions below his breasts at all. No one would be able to tell he’d had surgery. 

I’d explain that to him later, though. Some other time. 

My hand slipped around the nape of his neck, pulling him down so that he would kiss me again. Despite the lack of experience, Jean’s mouth did things to me. My whole body shivered as his teeth latched on to my bottom lip, just for a moment, like he was savoring my taste. I tugged at the edge of his binder. His back stiffened, and he paused. 

“Want to keep it on?” I asked.

“I’ve worn it eight hours. And it…when it’s wet it…” He didn’t finish his sentence as his fingers curled underneath it and he yanked it up over his head. After, I saw what he meant. The binder had chaffed against his skin, leaving long read indentations along his ribs and near his armpits. It didn’t look comfortable.

Even though I hadn’t been looking, he covered his breasts. I cocked my head at him. He bit his lip before explaining. “It’s not that I don’t want you to see them. It’s that I don’t want to.”

I thought about that for a moment, wondering what would make him feel better. His whole body felt like it was coiled up, loaded, wound so tight that at any moment he’d burst. My hands slid along his shoulders and thighs, trying to sooth him. “You’re a man, right?”

He deadpanned at me. “Yes.”

“And this is your body?” My hands slid up his stomach and around his waist.

Jean rolled his eyes. “ _Yes_.”

“Then it’s a man’s body.” When I said it, his features softened and he looked down at himself as if seeing it all for the first time. “And your chest, is a man’s chest.”

At my words, Jean’s arms fell from his chest leaving himself exposed. He looked down at both his breasts, as if he had no idea how they’d gotten there. But at least he didn’t look like he was repulsed anymore. 

Laying my hand flat against his chest – not groping, or cupping or doing anything I would to a girl, obviously – I felt his erratic heartbeat. 

“You sure you’re ready for this?” 

“I have to be.”

“No, you don’t. Not this, Jean.”

He bent down to kiss me, and his fingers curled in my hair. I lost my breath in the sensation of his against my neck, the warmth, the dragging of his lips, the heat of his tongue. I knew nothing about this. I knew less than him. Nothing had ever made me feel like this. I might as well have never been touched before.

“I want to be,” he said, “I want this.”

His hands unhooked the button of my jeans. Then they unzipped me. I did the same to him, before rolling him on to his back. First I slid my jeans and boxers off. Jean’s gaze latched onto me, looking me up and down and memorizing every bit of me for later, like he’d never see it again. My chest and stomach were dusted with dark hair over brown skin. My happy trail thickened the lower it went, until it turned into dark curls. My hips were just a bit wider than most guy’s, but other than that, my chest, stomach and legs were toned. My shoulders were wide, defined, sharp rather than round. 

He wasn’t done staring even as I began kiss down his jaw. His hands slid over my shoulders, exploring the plains of my back as my lips molded to his collarbones, each breast and then the marks on his ribs. His stomach rose and fell a little faster, a little harder the lower I went. By the time my mouth sucked on the flesh around his hipbone his body trembled. To offer some support, my free hand laced with his while the other began inching his pants and underwear down his soft thighs. His hips were narrower than mine, but his thighs were thick and smooth and I wanted to bite into them and mark him up. 

But more than anything, when I parted his legs and got a look at his lips I – my mouth watered. Oh God, I hadn’t done this in forever but oh fuck, I missed it. I fucking loved eating someone out. I loved tasting someone. And I was going to take my time with him.

“Are you going to, uh,” he started. His knees leaned inward, because he didn’t feel confident enough to spread them the way I wanted him to. He hadn’t looked down at me. His fists were curled in the sheets. By the look on his face, he was terrified, but I didn’t think it was of me. “Your fingers. You won’t…?”

His meaning sunk in, and I nodded in understanding. I’d had that problem too, at first. I could jerk off but couldn’t stand having anything inside of me, even tampons.

“Just a blowjob.” I prayed he’d let me use my mouth.

Jean’s eyes glazed over at my use of the word “blowjob” to describe what I was about to do to him, and I had known it would. He audibly swallowed, and gave me one curt nod. 

I grinned, before tilting my head down to take care of him. I hitched one of each of his legs over each of my shoulders, making just enough room for my head. My fingers parted his lips so I wouldn’t get hair in my mouth. First I only kissed him, but then I succumbed and let myself taste him. 

Jean arched, and let out a desperate moan. He cut himself off half-way through, clamping his mouth shut. He shook his head, and I pulled away. “What?” I blurted, and nudged him so that he would look at me. I was afraid I’d done something wrong.

“My voice. Can’t stand my voice. I sound like a chick in a porno. It’s – ”

“A man’s voice. And I want to hear it.”

“It just felt so good, I –”

“ _Good_ ,” I interrupted. “Now let me make it _better_.”

“Fuck, fuck, okay,” he breathed, tangling his hand in my hair. 

My mouth was already on him again, and this time Jean let himself be loud. He didn’t try to control his pitch either, so I knew he’d let his guard down. The voice I was hearing was his without trying, and God damn if it wasn’t the sexiest thing I’d ever heard. With every desperate moan, I became wetter. The thought that he’d never felt this before, that my lips and tongue were the first to ever make him feel this good, and that his body had never before in his life experienced this much pleasure, and now that he had it was because of fucking _me_ made every cell in my body vibrate with fucking need. 

Jean let out garbled nonsensical praise as my tongue rotated on his clit, and finally that praise turned into nothing but my name as he screamed. His body curled up, unable to cope with the pleasure. His thighs tightened around my ears. His hands tangled in my hair. His abdomen crunched as he leaned forward, before he flung himself back again to arch up. He begged for me with _Pleases_ , and _Erens_ , and _Oh Gods_ and _So goods_ , and finally he actually did cry. I heard the sob through his panting. The last thing he said was, “I’m – Eren, I – I think I’m gonna…Oh _fuck_ , I’m coming!” He throbbed against my mouth a second later and his body shook.

Just when I was about to pull off, Jean whimpered, “ _Please_ , keep going.”

My head jerked back in surprise. “I don’t – that’s not a good idea. It can get really sensitive and it might –”

Jean’s head perked up. His eyes met mine, and I could see the certainty in them as much as the raw, aching _need_. “Please.” He wasn’t a man that said please, I reminded myself. So I should probably listen. 

But not without teasing him first. My lips trailed down one of his thighs. When they edged close to the crease between his thigh and his lip I nipped at the skin. “You want me to keep sucking your cock?”

Jean’s hips squirmed at that, and he nodded. “Please. Need it. Need it so bad.”

“Say it,” I said.

Jean groaned and writhed in frustration. His hand tightened in mine, and his nails dug in, but I didn’t budge until he spoke. “ _Eren,_ suck my dick. Please, please, baby.”

My spine reacted to the pet name and a shudder ran through me. My own cock ached and my insides tightened because Goddamn I’d never been this turned on before. Without deciding to, I was blowing him again and he drew out a sigh of relief. This time I sucked more, put more pressure on him, and couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Love the taste of your cock, baby.” And at this Jean sobbed again. I knew what I was doing to him, I knew that I was giving him something he’d always dreamed of but never believed he’d get, always wanted but never would have let himself have, and when he came again and his fingers went white-knuckled laced in mine I knew I would do this for him every day for forever if I would never die. 

“Don’t stop, don’t stop,” he pleaded, and I didn’t doubt him this time. I was too into it anyway. I didn’t want to stop. 

And I didn’t. Not until Jean’s legs snapped around my head like a jaw, clamping down on me after his fifth fucking orgasm thirty minutes later. 

“Fuck, okay, okay,” he said, “No more. I can’t. Fuck.”

With some mourning, my lips parted from his between his legs, and I kissed my way back up his stomach. He tasted of sweat, and mint, and cologne, and sex, and boy and I was hungry for it. I nipped at every span of skin my lips dragged over.

Shivering, now clammed up in the aftermath of it all, he clung to me. He still hadn’t caught his breath. “Is it always that good?” 

I snorted, tucking my nose into the crook of his neck. “For me it’s _never_ that good.”

Glancing at him now, I lifted one hand up to wipe away the remaining tears that hadn’t quite fallen to the pillow. He looked a little ashamed of this, but I thought I understood. It wasn’t just because he was overwhelmed by the pleasure – although that still contributed – but because he had waited so long and had never imagined it would be like it was. Because finally it had happened, and nothing had gone wrong, and he was okay. After it all, he was okay. He wasn’t having a panic attack, he wasn’t pulling his clothes back on, he wasn’t traumatized from being touched that way. I didn’t even think he had the chance to become dysphoric. The moment my mouth was on him it had wrapped him up in it.

“Thank you,” he whispered. I only kissed him.

His eyes were droopy, and his breathing had relaxed. I knew he was about thirty seconds from falling asleep, but I could feel my fucking pulse between my legs. I stood up, even though I didn’t want to leave him, to head to the bathroom.

“Wait,” he said, “Where’re you going?”

“To get off,” I said, gesturing to my legs, which were sort of embarrassingly coated in cum. 

His eyebrows furrowed. Then he reached out for me. I took his hand in mine. He said, “Get over here.”

“Dude, I’m about to die of horniness.” 

“Yeah, I can tell. So get over here.”

“You’re going to do it?”

“Not if you don’t _get over here_.” He tugged me by my hand toward him. I plopped back on my mattress, tucking my pillow behind me so that I could comfortably lean against the headboard. Like he’d done it a thousand times before, Jean situated himself between my legs and spread them. This didn’t affect me in any kind of way. For me, even when I looked down at myself and saw what my body lacked, I saw a man. My clit wasn’t a clit it was my cock, and it was fucking rock-hard right now.

Jean parted my lips, and his thumb stroked me. “It’s so big.”

I shivered. “Testosterone does that.”

“So that will happen to me?” His thumb kept stroking over me and I stifled a moan.

“E-eventually.” 

Jean’s thumb slid off of me. “Kinda pointless trying to compete with what you just did,” he muttered. His mouth’s touches against me at first were unceremonious even as he kissed up and down either side of my thigh. It wasn’t until he began working my cock that I knew he was actually being just as gentle, just as affectionate, just as worshipful and loving as I was with him. Only it was _all_ centered on my cock.

Oh my fucking _God_. I hadn’t had sex in _so long_.

His inexperience hardly mattered when he used his mouth on my cock the same way he did when he kissed me. His lips were tentative, but appreciative. The pleasure built slowly, thoroughly reaching far inside of me because Jean kept his same pace, slow, tender laves of his tongue against me. He kept his eyes shut. One arm hooked around my leg and stroked my thigh. With the other, he slid his fingers inside of me. When he began easing them in and out I let out a whimper. 

“Fuck, that’s it, Jean,” I heard myself say, although I couldn’t remember deciding to speak, “ _Just_ like that.”

Jean didn’t stop. He didn’t blow me like he knew what he was doing, but like he wanted to learn how to do this expertly. Everything he did was because he wanted to see how I would react, he experimented with me, and it just happened that it really fucking worked. The unpredictability of it, the innocence and curiosity behind it, the inability to brace myself for how he’d use his mouth next. His tongue put more pressure on me, along with his fingers, and the coiling inside me had wound so tight, my body went rigid. I let out Jean’s name, gripping onto the sheets, and then in his hair. He pulled off long enough to glance up at me, eyes smoldering, as he bit his lip, before he bent down to suck me. His head moved up and down with it, and I was too far gone. It rose inside of me, right up into my chest as my heart slammed against my ribcage, and then I groaned his name, tightening around his fingers. My legs snapped shut around his head like his had to me, and Jean pulled off.

“You came?” he asked. 

I stared at him, unable to believe he couldn’t tell, and then nodded because I couldn’t find the words. 

“Should I keep going?” he asked. 

I shook my head. “Can’t all be as lucky as you.”

He smirked at that, before he scooted up beside me in the bed. He pressed his lips against my neck, and then my ear, before he said, “Let me know, if you’re ever ready again.”

I let out a shaky exhale, before turning to kiss him. Our limbs tangled together, all of my body to all of his, and I could taste myself on him as he could on me. His heart and my heart strummed just below our ribs, reaching for each other in the quietest moment of my life.

“See.” I looked him in the eyes. I cupped his cheek in my hand. My lips brushed against his as I spoke. “It’s not so bad.”

“I love you, Eren,” he said. 

“I loved you the moment I saw you.” I didn’t even hesitate.

Jean’s eyes flicked downward. His eyelashes brushed against his cheeks. I kissed both his eyelids before he looked up at me again. “Stop lying,” he said.

“I’m not. I saw you, and I knew that if God gave me enough time, I’d love you. It wasn’t even up to me.”

Jean smiled, nothing like how he usually smiled. He so rarely wore just one expression, and for the first time ever I was seeing Jean absent of pain. He only wore happiness, and it was so blindingly beautiful I understood why it was such a rare sight. I could not function if I had to be subjected to this smile daily.

“I don’t believe in God.” He paused after, as if he feared I would suddenly hate him. I didn’t. “But…sometimes, I want to. And I look for things that will make me believe.”

“Like what?” 

His fingers laced with mine. “Like meeting you. I just happened to take the same class the same semester as you. Our teacher just happened to assign that assignment. And I just happened to find the balls to admit something to myself that I had been ignoring for years, right then. And she just happened to ask you to hand out the secrets. And then you…as if none of that was enough, you gave a shit when you saw my secret.”

Jean’s hand trailed up and down my arm, over my chest, lingering on my scars before resting against my heartbeat. 

“Makes me feel like for once the odds that all this was fate are higher than the odds that all this was coincidence. Some things…they’re just…In real life, things don’t happen at the right time in the right place. But you did.”

I smiled, but my lip wavered. “I think about that a lot.” I didn’t add that I thought about it with my dad, not him. But since today, now I knew that whenever I thought about fate, it would only ever be with him in mind.

“I never used to,” he said, “But lately.”

“Hey. Wanna spend the night? It’s late.” It was beyond late, actually. I’d forgotten all about that thing called time. 

Jean tensed, and I met his gaze waiting for an explanation. “Sure...” he said, “Just have to call my mom.”

While he called her to let her know he’d be spending the night out, I began getting ready for bed. While I brushed my teeth I overheard him talking to his mom. He had to reassure her more than once that he was safe, that he was with someone he knew well, that he wasn’t drinking and so on… 

He said, “I’ll call you tomorrow morning to make sure you took your pills, okay?” 

Then a second later, “I know I don’t need to remind you. I just…I don’t know. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Love you.”

When he hung up, I was standing in the doorway to my room. 

“Sorry that took so long. I don’t stay out much.”

“It wasn’t long. Do you need something to sleep in?”

Jean glanced down at himself, still naked. No one would be able to tell that earlier today he couldn’t stand the thought of looking down. “I’ll sleep like this,” he said. 

I smiled as I pulled him into me by his waist. While walking backward toward my bed, I guided him. He barely flicked off the light before I had tugged him too far away to reach it. Then we tumbled into bed. We kissed for a long time, but it wasn’t hot or urgent. It was just nice, comforting, _warm_. 

I let him spoon me, because I guessed he’d always been the little spoon before. His body was tense for a long while, because he had become aware of himself again, and how he sat and touched and acted, whether or not it was manly enough. Eventually though, I felt him relax. His breathing deepened. The weight of his body leaned into me. When I finally began to doze, I thought about how Jean was the first person to ever share this bed with me.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, Jean makes a decision that inspires Eren to face his past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't updated in forever and I'm so sorry! I'll try to update more often! In the meantime, thank you for reading this chapter!

When I woke up, I rolled over to reach for Jean, as if on instinct. Somehow, my body already knew that was what it was supposed to do each morning, even though I’d never woken up with him before. It reminded me of the first time I saw Jean, how instantly I knew I wanted to be with him. 

Only problem was, when I rolled over he wasn’t there. I sat up in bed, patting the sheets around me as if he might be hiding under the blanket or in the pillowcase. I tilted my head, straining to locate a shower running, or coffeemaker dripping or keyboard tapping. My house was silent. 

I stood up, trying to hold back my panic. As I got dressed my heart pounded and with each passing second I contemplated all the reasons he had left. Not the least likely of which was that he simply couldn’t handle what had happened. He’d taken a huge step for me, and I already knew that even if it meant we couldn’t be together, I would understand. It wasn’t up to me to decide how quickly he came to terms with being trans, or being in a gay relationship, or having sex for the first time or really anything at all. I suddenly regretted everything that happened the day before. I should have known not to push it. What if we stopped talking? Stopped hanging out? Having a relationship with him for one night wasn’t worth losing him forever.

My front door slammed shut and I sprinted into the hallway to see if it was him. It was. He wore a pair of gym shorts he’d borrowed from me, and his sports bra, nothing else. And it was apparent why, since his forehead, chest and arms were slicked with sweat. I gazed long and hard at him, because Goddamn he looked good, all glistening in the light and bullshit and he laughed at me as he tugged his headphones out.

“You run?” I ask.

He still breathed heavily, so he nodded before gasping, “Yeah. Every morning. Since…middle school.”

My eyebrows shot up. “I haven’t voluntarily exercised since middle school.” 

He huffed out another hoarse laugh. “I’d kiss you but –” He cut himself off to gesture to himself. “Gotta shower.”

I bit my lip and grinned as I pulled him toward me by his waist. “That’s actually perfect because I was _going_ to blow you again this morning but I also _really_ want to watch you shower. So. Two birds, one stone.”

Jean looked a bit startled by what I said. It took him a moment to respond. “You – I mean, you – Want to again?”

My arms loosened from around him, and I met his gaze. “Hey, look, if you don’t want to –”

“No, I do.” A shy smile crept across his face and a wave of sparks traveled through my body at the sight. When he let his guard down he was so fucking beautiful. “I just…uh, gotta make it quick, because I told my mom I’d be home in an hour.”

“Oh,” I said, “Oh, right. Duh.”

He kissed me and ran toward the bathroom like a hit-and-run and he laughed while I over-exaggerated my disgust at the taste of his sweat on my lips. When the water started to spray I bolted into the bathroom with him, so that I could make the most of our time before he went home. 

…

Jean lived in a one-story rambler. In front of the house, beautiful yet somewhat scruffy plants grew along the house, distracting from the grayish paint peeling off the house’s siding. The garage had long ago been renovated so that it extended their living room, rather than stored cars. The window-front of that garage was veiled by drapes, just sheer enough to see that inside was a small, but cozy loveseat with family photos and a collection of variously-sized crosses adorning the floral-printed walls. 

Jean sighed from the passenger seat. “This is it.”

I smiled. “Can I come in?” 

He nodded. “She’s been waiting a long time for me to start dating again.”

“She has?”

He nodded as he climbed out of the passenger seat. “Come on.”

I followed directly behind him. Suddenly I became hyperaware of his masculinity. The short hair, loose jeans, plain wrinkled T-shirt, and especially his walk. Each day he broke in his new walk a little bit more and I’d guess that over half the people who happened to catch sight of him lately would correctly recognize his gender. Up close, I wasn’t as sure, but…His mom was used to seeing him in his typical Plain Jane uniform, not this.

“What are you going to tell your mom about your clothes?” I asked, as we stepped onto the porch. Jean pulled keys out of his pocket. He carded through a few of them before selecting the one designated for his front door.

“I’m going to come out. I mean, shouldn’t my clothes like, be self-explanatory after that?” 

My eyes bulged. “You’re going to come out. Now. With me here? Are you _sure_?”

He opened his front door without responding to me. Inside, there was hardly an inch of wall exposed. So many family photos, postcards, artwork and _crosses_ all over the place. Directly in front of the entrance was his tiny yellow kitchen. One portion of the countertop was crowded with pill bottles and Post-it notes with reminders scribbled on them to go there or buy that. 

A hallway stretched to my left. On either side were doors and one door was at the head of the hallway that must have been the bathroom. Jean pulled me to the right, around a partition that revealed the kitchen table and the living room that was obviously too big for the rest of the house. By too big, I didn’t mean too big for an average living room. No wonder the garage had been renovated to make it bigger.

On the recliner on one side of the window, out of sight of the street beyond it, sat his mom, knitting a scarf. At first she didn’t look up, but somehow I could clearly tell she knew we were there. Maybe it was because Jean leaned against the TV stand with his arms crossed, and glanced at his mom with no expression on his face at all, I wondered if he was just waiting.

“So glad you’re finally home,” his mom said. “This must be…?”

Her eyes met mine, and they were exact replicas of Jean’s. Already I felt comfortable in her presence. I gave her a little wave.

“Eren,” Jean said. And then, ever so bluntly, “He’s my boyfriend.” 

She scrutinized me more closely, knitting now without even looking at her hands. I waved again, awkwardly. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never done the meet-the-parents thing. She tilted her head at me and smiled. “Well, now I have to learn everything about you.”

I laughed, feeling relieved. When I came here today, I didn’t know what to expect. There weren’t a lot of schizophrenic people on TV, and the ones that were usually played serial killers, or something. Jean had told me a while ago to not expect anything different, and I really tried to, but it didn’t quite work.

Bottom line was she was friendly, and though she appeared a bit timid, or on edge, because of shaking hands and eyes flicking around the room as if looking for a bug, she was far from threatening. 

Jean pulled me by my hand to the love seat on the wall adjacent to his mom. _Modern Family_ played on the TV, but at a very low volume. Either side of the TV was stacked with DVDs. No Blu-Rays. All of them were children’s movies or family movies, from what I could tell. Mostly older movies too, pre 2000. Disney movies and classics like _Sixteen Candles_ and _Dirty Dancing_. 

“Mom?” Jean asked. His mom perked her head up, and adjusted her glasses on her nose. She looked at him so thoroughly, paying attention to him as if whatever he said was the utmost importance. Like Jean was about to reveal he would single-handedly abolish world hunger. “I need to tell you something first, okay?”

She nodded at him. The only sound in the room was the clacking of her needle things. 

“I know you perceive me as your daughter,” he started, sounding professional, almost therapeutic, “But I’m actually your son.”

Ms. Kirstein furrowed her eyebrows. She glanced at her watch, and the crosses on her wall, and at a baby picture of Jean wearing a pink polka-dot dress hanging above the TV. She returned her attention to him, “How so?”

That was _it_? I gaped at her, and then gaped at the crosses on her wall as well. Deep down, I had been repressing the fear that she would blow up in his face and beg him to repent or something. I thought she’d at least cry. I had the horrible feeling I’d have to bail with him, and comfort him the whole way back to my place in the car. 

“Well, have you ever heard the term transgender?” he asked. 

She nodded, but in an absent-minded way that meant she was trying to recall a time she had, and not that she was answering his question.

“I don’t think so, no,” she responded. 

Jean turned to me then. “I think you can explain it better than me.”

I blushed, and tried to clear my throat. The thought of speaking right now terrified me. This was such an intimate discussion, and such a crucial milestone in his life. I didn’t want to mess anything up.

“Well,” I said, and then she gave me that same piercing gaze. “If someone is transgender, it means that on the inside, they feel like a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth. So…Jean’s birth certificate says he’s female. But Jean identifies as male.”

Jean nodded, as if I’d read the definition of transgender, and hadn’t blurted out those words on a whim.

Jean’s mom blinked a lot, and nodded again like she was thinking. She turned her head toward Jean, who was waiting patiently. “So, it’s a mental illness then?”

My skin tightened at those words and I felt the rage boiling up inside of me. Jean must have noticed I was about to yell, because he placed his hand on my knee, both a warning and a comfort. 

“No,” he said. “It’s not a mental illness. It’s…just an aspect of who I am. Like…being white. Or blond. You know? It’s just a thing I am.”

She looked even more confused. “And there are others who feel like this?”

He pointed his thumb at me. “Yeah. Actually, Eren’s transgender too.”

She made a face like _Ooooh_ and said, “So this was Eren’s idea?”

Again, I felt like I would explode. My fists balled and I jerked forward, about to stand up – and do what, I didn’t know – but Jean’s hand grounded me. He pried my hand open and held it, but kept his eyes on his mom. “No. I was born this way. I’ve always felt this way. Eren taught me what these feelings meant, he taught me the word transgender, but he did _not_ tell me to _be_ transgender. It’s not a choice. Like being gay, you know? It’s not a choice.”

At this, she raised her eyebrows. This time it looked as if she actually understood. “Are you gay, Jean?” she asked, pointing at me.

He smiled at her, but shook his head. "Bi." 

She looked at me, and then back at Jean. “This is a lot to take in.”

“I know. And I don’t expect you to – get it, right away. But, basically, call me Jean. And…when you’re talking about me, use he and him. Okay?”

She took in a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “That’s going to be hard to get used to.”

“I know. But it’s necessary, Mom.”

She nodded, and as soon as she stood up, Jean walked over to her. She hugged him, but if I didn’t know better, I would say that he was preventing her from falling. That was how frail and weak she looked. And that was how strong and capable he was.

“And, Mom…” He started, pulling his head back just enough to look her in the eyes. “Even though it’s not a mental illness, a lot of people are going to treat me like it is. They’re going to treat me the way they treat you. Maybe even worse. When people find out, they might blame you. And – they might treat you even worse too. You understand?”

She hesitated, but nodded. She looked like she might cry when she held Jean’s face in her hands. “ _Is_ it my fault?”

“No no no,” he said. “None of this is your fault.”

“Okay,” she rasped, “okay, Jean.”

He gave her a sheepish smile then. “Okay. Now, you can talk to Eren if you want. I’ll start lunch.”

Jean stepped away from her, and as he walked toward the kitchen she watched him go before sitting down again. “Everything’s already prepared in the fridge,” she told him.

“Got it,” he said, popping the fridge door open.

She looked at me then, and smiled politely. I held my breath for a moment and did the same. I was nervous and relieved and happy and overwhelmed all at once. But I tried to stay composed, so that I could talk to his mom and make the impression I wanted to on her. 

“So, Eren, are you from around here?” she asked, casually, but I could tell this was still some sort of test.

“Texas, actually.”

She nodded. She didn’t look at me while she knitted now. The sounds of Jean pulling stuff out of the fridge and setting other stuff on the counter comforted me. I wasn’t really alone right now. He was within earshot. He’d intervene if something came up that I didn’t want to talk about.

She asked me about Texas, since she’d never been there. I told her what everyone had heard, and for the most part was true. Everything was bigger in Texas. We had our southern hospitality. Yes, everyone really wore cowboy boots and hats and enormous belt buckles. But I added other things of my own, things about Texas that were much more important to me. Spanish was nearly as common to hear as English, for one. The summers were unbearably hot, but the rest of the year I could walk outside in shorts and a T-shirt and not have to worry about getting cold or uncomfortable for the rest of the day. Cacti grew everywhere outside of the cities, making it feel like a desert. But within the cities, people had grass lawns and palm trees lined every street and everything was so green I could pretend we lived on the ocean coast in Mexico.

Jean’s mom smiled at those parts, as if she too felt nostalgic about Texas. “I take it you visit often?”

I snorted. “Me? No, I haven’t been back since I started school.”

She cocked her head at me. “And why’s that?”

“Uh…” I swallowed, waiting for Jean to step in, but he was microwaving something and hadn’t heard. “Well, I don’t really get along with my family.”

“Your parents must be really conservative,” she said, “Texas and everything.”

I cleared my throat, a little shocked she’d mention something that personal. But it made sense…whatever her religious beliefs were, they certainly had no impact on her political beliefs or parenting. If they did, she wouldn’t have accepted Jean telling her he was trans the same way she probably would have if he had told her he was transferring to an out-of-state college. 

“My mom is,” I said. “I – don’t have a dad.”

She sighed. “I hear that.”

Something stopped me from telling her that he’d died. For some reason, I didn’t want her to think my dad walked out on me the way Jean’s dad had him. But a pang of guilt reverberated in my chest, as I remembered my dad wasn’t even _my_ dad. My real dad _had_ given me up for adoption, and in his own way had walked out on me.

But no – I had to remind myself that _those_ parents had done it to give me a better life, not just to better their own.

I shook my head, frustrated with myself for thinking so intensely about matters I usually saved for before bed. 

“So, you don’t get along with your mom. Is it because you’re…? Not a girl anymore?”

I gritted my teeth at her phrasing, but kept my mouth shut about it. She didn’t know any better and it was obvious she would never purposely offend Jean or anyone important to him.

“In a way,” I said. 

“I think some mothers forget that they might lose their children one day,” she said, almost as if to herself. “And I don’t mean dying, although that’s always an option. But I mean, until their babies turn eighteen, they know they aren’t going anywhere, you know? And so many of them don’t realize that after that, if you want your kids in your life, it has to be voluntary.”

I’d thought the same thing a hundred times, but had never managed to put it in such simple terms. And every time I tried to defend my actions to myself, I would bring up these exact points between grinding teeth and a spitting rage. She could say them so easily, so matter-of-factly. 

“Usually, I find that the moms who most often forget this, are the same moms who’ve never had their children taken away,” she nearly whispered.

A jolt of shock hit my ribcage and I whipped my head toward the kitchen. Had Jean kept something from me? I stared into the hallway, willing him to manifest and he did. Carrying three plates – the third resting in the crook of his arm like a waiter – with sandwiches and Mac N’ Cheese on them, he strode in carefully, and placed the food on the coffee table. Ms. K’s attention was immediately diverted to him, and the two began talking about everyday things. What was going on in _Modern Family_ lately? What had Mrs. K done the night before? What had _Jean_ done the night before? Oh, writing. Just writing. Writing an assignment with Eren for a class we shared, blah blah blah – Jean filled her in sparingly with a few details and I zoned out staring at the food Jean had prepared.

I ate methodically, silently, and couldn’t will myself to make eye contact with either of them.

I didn’t know why this bothered me. We hadn’t known each other very long and he’d said I love you to me way earlier than I could have ever hoped for. He’d told me a number of other really dark, really deep secrets before he even knew whether or not I was the type of person that would keep them. Hell, he’d trusted me with his deepest secret before we’d even exchanged names.

I had no right to _all_ of his secrets.

And yet…

…

At about nine, Jean and I made our way back to my car. He told me his mom wouldn’t be happy if he made staying out all night a habit, but since it was the weekend she was okay with it. 

I climbed into the driver’s seat and waited for him to slam the passenger door before asking, “You know that you don’t, like… _have_ to listen to her, right?”

Jean looked out the window so he wouldn’t have to face me. “It’s not that, Eren. It’s not like it’s a curfew. I’m basically her caretaker. I know she wasn’t – like she wasn’t all _A Beautiful Mind_ or _Soloist_ on you tonight, but that doesn’t mean she’s always in control. And she’d rather have me help her than some nurse or whatever.”

I swallowed and bowed my head, embarrassed. For a few minutes I just concentrated on driving, and then I reached for Jean’s hand. He held it, and I rearranged our hands so they were laced together. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking about it like that.”

Jean stared at me in the corner of his eye, and then said, “Well, it’s like that.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, hoping he could hear how much I was.

He bit his lip and met my gaze. “It’s okay. I’m just sensitive about my mom, that’s all.”

“You’re a really good son,” I said, honestly. Nothing like me. The guilt that had hit me earlier had stuck around, stirring in my stomach like nausea.

“She’s a really good mom,” he said. “We need each other.”

“I’m glad – Fuck, more than glad. I’m fucking stoked and amazed and over-fucking-joyed she was so cool with you coming out.”

He smiled, but it appeared saddened. “We’ll see. She might forget. Or pretend to forget. Her mood might change and she might not accept it randomly sometimes. My mom doesn’t have a lot of concrete opinions about much.”

“Is that because of her disease?” I asked, feeling nervous now. We’d just gotten in a spat over him staying over at my place, but hearing this made me want to make sure he didn’t go home. At least not without me.

He shrugged. “It’s not…technically a symptom. But…schizophrenia affects her in a lot of ways outside of just…the hallucinations and stuff. She doesn’t work because she’s afraid of computers and cash registers and stuff.”

“What, like, they’re gonna take over the world?”

He chuckled at that. “No. She’s just convinced she’d never be able to learn how to use them. They’re like…rocket ships to her. She’s afraid she’ll use one and like, delete her social security number and be wiped out from existence, or something. I explain that won’t happen, and on some level she knows it won’t and says so, but she can’t help the fear anyway.”

“Must be hard,” I breathed.

“It is,” he said, “but she’s pretty used to it now. She’s better now than she’s ever been.”

We paused. He looked deep in thought. I considered what his mom said again, about moms who’d never had their children taken away. “I didn’t mean her.”

He perked his head up to meet my gaze. “Thanks.”

“I guess you’ve probably had to…like go through a lot, because of her disease.” I meant to make that a question, not a statement. And I didn’t mean to sound like I was trying to pull information out of him either, but I so sounded like that. I sounded like the cop at the beginning of the cop interrogation, before the suspect realizes they’re a suspect at all.

Jean stared at our laced fingers. “What’d she say, Eren?”

“Nothing, I was just –”

“Eren.”

I huffed out all the air in my lungs. He knew better, so I didn’t lie. “She said something about…you know, you being taken away from her.”

Jean sat up straight, squaring his shoulders as if bracing himself for this conversation. “I was, a couple of times. My mom would go off her meds, and whenever she did that, she wasn’t in a state of mind to take care of me. Social worker came, I would be in foster care for a month or two. Eventually, something would happen. Someone would call the cops on her, she’d get arrested. One way or another she’d be forced back on her meds. And then, she’d take me back.”

I cleared my throat. We were quiet as I drove underneath three green lights. When the next faded to yellow, then red, and I eased into a stop, I dared myself to say something. “I can see why you didn’t want to tell me.”

Jean turned his head and watched my hand on the wheel as I took the turn toward my apartment. “What do you mean?”

“You never told me about it.” My voice was harsh, and I tried to control my expression. He looked hurt. I immediately felt mad at myself. This conversation wasn’t supposed to happen this way. I wanted him to feel comfortable telling me anything and now what would he feel? Scared to bring anything up probably.

“Eren,” he said. “I wasn’t keeping anything from you. I try not to think about when I was in foster care. I just didn’t think to bring it up because – and I didn’t want to embarrass my mom either. I don’t understand why you’d – like what the fuck is your problem right now?”

Jean was still talking, becoming angrier the more he realized I didn’t have even half the right to be mad. I processed what he said. Even felt relief that he wasn’t withholding any secret from me because he felt uncomfortable telling me, or thought I would reject him, or didn’t trust me or whatever. 

But Jean’s question threw me off. I had no idea what my problem was, really. Not entirely. It felt like I was accusing him of something and yet I wasn’t mad at him. I actually felt really guilty. For asking. For prying. And for…something else too.

All at once it hit me why this bothered me so much. It wasn’t really about Jean not telling me every one of his secrets (though I couldn’t lie, I wanted to know every one of them). It was about me, and voluntarily running away from home, abandoning my mom without an explanation. It was about wondering if now that she knew what it was like to be without her child, if she would accept her child regardless of his identity, just like Jean’s mom had. Maybe she wouldn’t have before I ran away. But now, couldn’t it be possible that she would take what she could get? 

I interrupted his rant, babbling, “Here I am, some random guy who’s fully transitioned, stealing money from a mom I ran away from without ever saying bye to, never even gave her an explanation – hell, I practically have it made – and here you are, pre-everything, with a mom who loves you and respects your gender and everything, but your situation is such shit that you – and you would never steal from her, or run away from her, even if it meant you could transition and – and – God, Jean. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I said a damn thing. I – this isn’t even about you.”

He hesitated for a moment, clearly thrown off by my outburst. Then he reached for my hand and squeezed it. I kept my eyes on the road. My apartment complex neared. Lights from individual windows specked the walls and through the branches of an oak tree I could just make out the shape of my balcony. 

“Just because I would never do that to my mom doesn’t mean I’m mad you left yours. Like, I get it, Eren. You know, I could find my dad, if I wanted to. It’d be a pain, but I could do it. Demand answers. Force him to face his mistakes. Or even try to make amends or something. But I just don’t fucking want to.”

I nodded along as he spoke. I agreed with everything he said. And yet, I still couldn’t relieve the guilt from my gut.

“I’m not going to beg my dad to be in my life, just because he’s my dad. People who want to be in my life will make sure they are. And it’s the same with your mom. If she wanted to be in your life, she would have found a way by now.”

I pulled into a parking spot outside my complex. Jean’s hand still gripped mine. For a moment, we were so still the only movements in the car were our heartbeats. I exhaled, slowly.

Jean would have been right if my mom had never tried to be in my life. But she had. Every year she called me on my birthday, and invited me home for Christmas. I would text her back, but that was always it. When I didn’t come, she sent Christmas gifts, which I immediately returned for money. She offered to fly here to see me before, but I always found a way to blow it off. On my dad’s death-day anniversary, she called, asked me if I had been to the grave, or if I wanted to. I had answered that one, but hung up before speaking. She sent me family photos, and when I wouldn’t answer her calls, she would have Mikasa email me. She asked for pictures of me that I never sent. Now and then she called me late at night, drunk, and left a long, blubbering message on my answering machine, asking me why I left. What she did. If she’d ever see me again. So many questions, on and on…I always called in sick the next day or skipped school, out of guilt, but still couldn’t call her. 

The only reason she’d never surprised me by showing up on my doorstep was because she didn’t know where I went to school or where I lived.

“I never let her in my life, Jean,” I whispered.

He turned his head to look at me. “If you don’t want her in your life, then that was the right thing to do.”

I didn’t respond. I had a lot to say, but couldn’t form the words. My throat felt too dry.

“Unless…you want her in your life,” he added, tentatively.

The rush I felt in my veins when I considered, _really_ considered going home for the first time since I left was both exhilarating and horrifying. In the past, I’d felt random urges to hop on a plane and go home before, but always discarded the thought because I was too afraid. What would I say? How could I explain? Would they even recognize me? Would they even let me in the house once they saw me? 

I didn’t think I could handle the rejection. _Officially_ handle the rejection. So far, I could still fantasize and pretend that if I went home, everything would be okay and they would accept me. But if I went home and they didn’t, then it would be official, and I wouldn’t be able to hope or pretend. 

I would be entirely alone in the world. 

Until now.

Now, if they rejected me, it no longer meant being alone. 

“Eren?” Jean asked.

I looked at him and forced a smile. “Let’s go to bed.”

“Are you okay?” 

“We’ll talk in the morning.”

At that, Jean jumped out of the car and headed inside. I was grateful to him for so much, and immensely grateful to him right then, for not pushing it. I needed to think. But first I needed to not think. I needed to crawl into bed with him, in the dark, and kiss him and hold him and tell him I love him and remind myself that I had him now. That I truly believed God meant for us to meet, and he was meant to be in life, and nothing could change that.

Even if I let someone else back in.

…

In the morning, I woke up to the rustling of Jean beside me. He had sat up, wearing nothing but women’s underwear and his sports bra – he must have just put those on, since all he wore to bed were his boxers. He pulled on socks I loaned him and stood off the bed, searching for shorts to run in.

“Does it bother you that you have to wear those?” I asked, groggily, rubbing my eyes.

Jean glanced down at himself. Like this, no one would know he was a man. He shrugged. “Not as much as it would bother me not to run.”

“God, it would bother me _to_ run. What’s wrong with you?” I hitched myself up on one elbow to get a better look at him, pulling basketball shorts on. I couldn’t fathom the idea of _wanting_ to run, but I loved looking at him like this, even if he wasn’t wearing something he felt comfortable in. It meant he felt comfortable around me. That was more important than anything.

“It’s…all I had before I met you, and you figured out I’m trans. When I run I feel like I’m in control of my body,” he mumbled, because he was hunched over pulling his tennis shoes on and tying his laces. Embarrassed maybe, too. 

“Oh,” I responded, blushing for not seeing the obvious. “That makes sense.”

Finally ready to run, he stepped toward me and bent over to kiss me. He smiled after, as if I hadn’t just asked that question and forced him to think about before he knew he was trans. He looked genuinely happy, which made me genuinely happy too. I placed my hand on the nape of his neck and held him there for a second longer. “Hurry,” I whispered.

He smirked. “That’s kind of the point.”

And then he was out of the room and out the door. 

This morning I expected to feel better than I had last night. Usually, all I had to do to take something off of my mind was send God a prayer, take an Advil PM and conk out for the night. Last night though, I was up at three listening to Jean’s breath and heartbeat, staring out the window at the night clouds drifting over the moon. 

Now, I heaved myself out of bed toward my dresser. In the bottom drawer, with all my journals, I kept a couple of photo albums. Digging underneath the stacks of three-ring binders, I hauled two of the photo albums out.

One was filled with pictures of me. Over the course of my transition, I took daily pictures of my progress. Some of the photos were just selfies, or pictures with friends, coworkers, students from the writing center and so on, but most were just mirror photos I took specifically to remind myself that even if everything looked the same to me, it wasn’t the same. At the time, I thought I was taking these photos for myself only. But I wondered why I really took them, as I passed through the pages of me post top-surgery, fuzzily smiling into the camera because I was so high on pain killers. There were pictures of my scars – stitched incisions then – following the pictures of me in the hospital. Now I wondered if I took them because I’d want something to show my mom if I ever spoke to her again.

Without really thinking, I pulled a duffel bag out of my closet and threw the photo album inside of it. Then I paged through the second one, full of all the pictures mom had sent me of her and Mikasa over the years. Most of them were pictures of Mikasa – Mikasa playing college basketball, Mikasa travelling in Europe and Japan, Mikasa in her first apartment, Mikasa with her two cats – but there were plenty of my mom and her together. Christmas and birthday photos. Pictures of them at weddings. Pictures of them at a football game and pictures of them with my grandparents. 

I trailed my fingers over all the photos. My mom looked older. So did Mikasa. I had never noticed it before, but they were both so different. Not as different as me, of course, but nonetheless they were no longer the same people from my memories. Time had moved on without me. 

I tossed it in the duffel bag on top of the other one. I stripped my closet of a half-dozen of my shirts, still on the hangers, and dropped them in too. Then jeans, and shorts, socks and underwear. Deodorant, tooth brush, all the hygienic necessities. My testosterone vial and syringes. Everything I’d need. Then, before I knew it I was packing for Jean. His binders, sports bras, underwear and boxers, the clothes I’d given him, and his phone charger.

Once my duffel bag was well over-flowing, reality came back to me. I couldn’t go to Texas. It would take all day and half of tomorrow to drive there, and the same for the way home. I’d barely get there before I’d have to turn around if I wanted to make it to school on Monday. I couldn’t force Jean into coming with me either. I wanted him to come, but I wouldn’t obligate him. 

Taking three slow breaths, I paced out of my bedroom, leaving the duffel bag right where it was. I paced for a few minutes, until I caught sight of the sun rising through my sliding glass doors. Heading out onto the balcony, I kept breathing slowly, trying to calm my heartbeat and think clearly. Pulling my phone out of my pocket, I scrolled through my contacts until landing on a name I hadn’t called in years. 

I stared at it for way too long. I couldn’t do it. 

Except, just as I was about to put my phone away, I lifted my head and caught a flash of movement between the trees on the ground. Jean, running, faster than I could imagine anyone could keep up with for long. He followed the winding paths between trees around the parking lot, hair fluttering and back sheening with sweat under the sizzling morning sun. He looked fearless, untouchable, invincible, and I was so in love with him. In love with him enough that I wanted to make him proud, I wanted other people to know I loved him, I wanted to be able to face my future the same way he faced his morning runs.

I selected her name, and heard the ring.

“ _Hello_?” Her voice was bewildered, but wide awake.

I hesitated. She wouldn’t recognize my voice. This was always the furthest I’d gotten because she wouldn’t recognize my voice. But I urged myself to say something, anything, because it was time. It was time to move on. “Hi, Mom.”

“I’m sorry, who is this?” she asked, even though she must have seen my name on her phone screen a second ago. 

“Mom,” I breathed, my hands shaking and my chest seemingly inflating with helium, “It’s Jenifer.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eren makes the biggest decision of his life with Jean's help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone who is still reading this. It has been over a year since I have updated this fic. If you read any of my other works, were reading them as I wrote them, you might have noticed that this isn't something I do. Even when I've taken a while to update, it has never been so long as to give anyone reason to think that I've given up on finishing the fic. This time I did.
> 
> The thing is, when I started writing this fic in 2015, I had undiagnosed depression that I was attempting to cope with, unconsciously, in a way that would set me on the path to writing this fic. Because the root of my depression was dissatisfaction with my appearance, I was desperate to name and explain why that was. So, in the state of severe depression and body dysmorphia, I began to think I might be trans. I even came out to my husband as bigender and requested that he and my teachers and people online use different pronouns. For a year, I lived my life 100% certain I was a trans masculine person, and it inspired me to write so much of my fan fiction, including this piece. 
> 
> Now, years later, medicated, seeing a therapist, and in an entirely different place in my life, I don't identify as trans anymore. I don't really know what happened. The feelings of discomfort I had with my body that I identified as gender dysphoria have not only gone away, but appear to have never been gender dysphoria at all.
> 
> I know that there are people who believe that some people are pretending to be trans, because they want attention, or they want to be special, or this or that. And I know the vast majority of the community believes that you have to be born trans. 
> 
> I personally, stand by the belief that if someone "chooses" to be trans, fuck it, they are. This was a belief I adopted while I honestly believed I was trans. I believed that if someone decided that for whatever reason, they'd be happier identifying as a different gender, and just decided to transition, either physically or socially, then their identity was valid. Even if they were just experimenting, exploring, trying to make sure that the identity they were assigned and took for granted all those years was actually right for them, and not a different identity that they'd never considered enough to question whether or not it might be right for them instead. 
> 
> But let me be clear. This wasn't what I was doing. I didn't at any point decide to experiment with my identity. At no point did I think that I should give being trans masculine a shot, because I had a feeling it would make me happier. When I identified as trans, it was a painful awakening inside of me that I feared would destroy my marriage, my family ties, and possibly my life. It was _entirely_ involuntary and I wished daily that it would magically go away, and then it fucking did weeks after I got on medication and realized how desperate I was to accept my body on terms I could understand.
> 
> So, according to this belief of mine, I guess you could say that for that year I identified as trans, I _was_ trans. But, even as I stand by that belief, I don't think I ever was trans. I think I was severely depressed, had severe body dysmorphia, and subconsciously knew that I would sooner accept my body if I hated it because it didn't match my gender identity, and not because it wasn't conventionally beautiful enough for the misogynistic society I grew up despising and naturally, would never ever choose to subscribe to...except that I did. 
> 
> That's just how it is, I guess. I want to be skinny and beautiful and have a big firm ass and porcelain skin and full lips and toned legs and perky breasts and and hourglass figure and I don't have any of that. Despite the feminist I claim I am, misogynistic beauty standards have engrained themselves in me, and I just have to accept that this is why I hate my body when I'm not medicated or seeing a therapist or receiving emotional support from those I love. Not because I'm something as beautiful and unique as trans. 
> 
> Anyway, the reason I'm telling you all this is because, when I identified as trans, I openly condemned cis writers who wrote trans narratives. I condemned them because their work was usually transphobic, even if they were well-meaning. I condemned them because there were enough cis writers already, and not enough trans writers. I condemned them because they thought they had the right to write trans narratives and be heard when trans writers aren't given the right to write trans narratives and be heard. 
> 
> (continued at the end)

The other end of the line went silent. I could hear my mom breathing, something in the background shifting, but still she said nothing. I waited, opened my mouth to say something, but couldn’t find my voice.

“Jenifer?” she finally said, as if she’d never heard the syllables before, and was trying them out on her tongue for the first time. Then she went, “Jenifer?! Oh my – Why do you sound so – Why haven’t you –”

She started to sob on the other end. She made several more attempts to say something but couldn’t over her crying. I froze in place, staring wide-eyed as Jean made another pass through the neighborhood, heading his way back toward my building. My mom cut herself off.

“Jenifer, Jenifer, listen to me. Please come home. Just come home. _Please_ , please! Please, just come home!”

My front door slammed shut. My lip quivered. I didn’t know what to do. I panicked.

“I – I’m sorry – I – I have the wrong number,” I blurted, and hung up on her. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it yet. I might not ever be able to.

Jean walked up behind me. Rested a hand on the small of my back. Glanced over my shoulder. 

“Who was on the phone?” he asked.

“I called her,” I said.

“Who?” 

“My mom.”

Jean spun me around. He looked into my eyes, searching for something, ready to ask something, but decided not to. 

“I can’t do it,” I choked.

“You want to do it in person?” he asked.

And I jolted, realizing he had misunderstood what I meant. He _thought_ I meant that I couldn’t tell her over the phone. Of course, I meant I couldn’t do it at all. But now that he said it, I realized that after everything, if I was ever going to come out to my mom, I owed it to her to do it in person. Doing it on the phone would just be adding insult to injury.

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m going to do it in person.”

He grinned, like he was proud of me and I felt ashamed. It made my resolve clear. Now that I had said it, I would do it. If not for my mom and if not for me, then for him. So as not to tell him a lie. 

“Good. When?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, and even though I could have come up with a time – I had just packed a bag minutes ago – I didn’t want to. Coming up with a time would have made it too real, and I had only just accepted that I would do it at all let alone at a specific time. 

“We should do it the first long weekend we get,” he said.

And I was so caught up in the “we” part, as in we go together, that I sort of didn’t hear the rest. 

“You’d do that?” I asked.

At this he combed his fingers through his hair. “I mean, you were there for me.”

I couldn’t possibly turn him down now. “Okay. First long weekend this semester.”

He smiled at me, and leaned down to kiss me. “Shower?” he asked.

“You go in ahead of me.”

He nodded as he spun around and headed toward the bathroom. In the bedroom I unpacked our bag.

…

Sunday night, Jean and I were at my place, both of us sitting side-by-side on my loveseat, typing. Our assignments were due the following morning. We, as planned, were writing the true stories of each other’s lives, as we knew them. This seemed even harder for me than making something up, as if I had no idea who he was. As a writer, I had always felt as though there were no limits to language and that I could do anything with words that I couldn’t do in real life. Words were all we had to make something that we knew clear to someone else who didn’t know. For the first time, there was something in life I’d witnessed, something I’d experienced, that no amount of words at my disposal could make clear. 

It was just a piece about someone who felt like a man on the inside. It should come perfectly easily to me to write about Jean now that I knew him, but maybe I was just too close to Jean now to write about him as he was in reality. I knew him too well. And all I wanted to do was write about Jean and nothing else. 

That was a foreign feeling to me – wanting to write about real life. Wanting to write about real people I’d met and real things I’d done. Wanting to write about myself. I’d always kept journals, but it had never felt like “writing” the way writing stories did. I never had any intention of publishing any of it, and couldn’t fathom a worse punishment for recording my thoughts. All that journaling had ever been for me was a reminder for all I’d been through. When I paged through them, I relived over and over again how far I’d come. Only now that I’d met Jean and let him read the journals, did I realize what my journals were worth. 

At about midnight, we both shut our laptops. Jean told me that he’d been inspired by my decision to come out to my mom in person. He’d attempted to write about what it must have been like to call my mom, talk to her, and say my dead name out loud. What it must have been like for her to not recognize my voice, and to desperately want me to come home anyway. While he spoke a heat spread across my skin, like a fever. It felt as though my skin was loose on my body. I was extremely uncomfortable, restless, and unable to move. I didn’t want to think about this from my mom’s perspective. I didn’t want to think about this. Or I might not do it. 

But he admitted that it was hard for him to write about me too, and about something so important in my life, when he felt so strongly about it. He ended up thinking about me, and what he wanted for me, and what I would want to happen, and it was too hard to find words that carried the same depth as his emotions. 

“And so I ended up writing a completely unbelievable profile of you, with no complexity, and no point,” he said, sighing. 

I couldn’t respond. I could barely even swallow. 

And I must not have worn a very good poker face, because he said, “Hey, you okay?”

We lay in bed together, my head against his chest, and his arm wrapped around me. Both of us in nothing but our boxers, loosely covered by blankets, with a breeze blowing over us from the window. I sighed and it rose goosebumps on his skin. He threaded his fingers through my hair. 

“I should have done everything differently,” I said.

He scooted a few inches deeper in the sheets and pulled out from under me so that he could face me. 

“I’m not going to lie,” he said.

“I wouldn’t want you to.”

He smiled, sadly. “You should have.”

I nodded. 

“But there’s not really anything you can do about it now. So just, I don’t know – do everything the way you should from now on. That’s why you called her, isn’t it? You want things to be different?”

“Yeah,” I said, “But I hung up on her because I don’t think they can be.”

He shrugged. “If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last week, it’s that you don’t want things to stay the same because you never even tried to change them.”

I nodded again. I was nodding too much, and not looking at him enough, and only then when I did look at him, gazing away and breathing deeply, did I realize I wasn’t the only one with something on my mind.

“What’s up?” I said, “Tell me.”

“In class tomorrow…everyone will know.”

I squinted at him. “So? They saw you in your other classes, didn’t they?”

“One of them has too many students in it for anyone to notice me. The other I had for the first time after you cut my hair, so no one knows me any differently. But…in fiction studio…they saw me with my long hair. And girl’s clothes. And then, what we’re writing about…if anyone reads it –”

“So?” I said, sitting up. I shook my head in confusion. “I thought you didn’t give a shit about that stuff.”

“I don’t,” he said. “But they will. And – Cis people hate people like us, don’t they?” 

I hesitated. Wished I had a complicated answer for him. I said, “Yeah. Pretty much.”

“I’m just thinking,” he said. “Everything you’ve given up for this. And on top of that, everyone hates you for it. How can it be worth it? I just want life to be easy. I just want to live an easy life, working from home, writing, and talking to other people as little as possible while making money.”

I shook my head. “Don’t say shit like that. What are you even living for, then?” 

He quieted then, and I knew my condescending tone had made him shut down. I sat up and nudged him. He looked me in the eyes.

“I don’t want you to waste your life because it’s easier too, that’s all,” I said.

“I don’t want you to make your life harder than it needs to be,” he said, without a blink.

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” I asked, honestly.

“So far, yeah,” he said, simply, and I couldn’t help but snort. After a moment, he added, “That’s why I want to go with you. I’m afraid if you go alone you won’t even ring the doorbell.”

My lip quivered. “You’re going to ring it for me?”

He shrugged. “If I have to.”

I let out a shaky exhale, and kissed him. He deepened it, wrapped his arms around me, and rolled over on top of me, kissing me everywhere until all I could think of was to keep breathing. 

… 

When I woke up, Jean wasn’t out for his morning run, like I assumed he’d be. Instead, he was sitting in my living room, on his laptop. He was fully dressed but not in running clothes. He wore a flannel and jeans. But underneath his flannel, I could tell he was wearing a sports bra and not a binder, as if no one would see him today. Or, I supposed, as if he was going to be doing something that he couldn’t do in a binder, like running, but why would he be wearing those clothes? At first I assumed he was making last-minute edits, but he didn’t appear to be typing.

“Jean,” I said, so that he would look up at me. “You aren’t running today?”

“No,” he said. “Class has been cancelled.”

“What, why? Already?” I walked into the living room and glanced out through my sliding glass doors, to check the weather, as if it’d be snowing in August.

“Sick baby at home,” he said. I could feel him waiting for me to look at him, and so I did. His expression was serious, as if he expected me to already know what he was about to say. But I didn’t.

“What?” 

He raised his eyebrows. “It’s our first long weekend.”

I stared at him, confused, and then it hit me. Not just what he meant, but the panic, the anger, the betrayal.

“The fuck it is, Jean!” I spit, immediately. “It’s Monday.”

“Yeah, and yesterday was Sunday. It’s our first long weekend,” he said, not batting an eye.

“You expect us to go on a Monday?” I fling my arms in the air, as if someone else could see me my protest, and agree. “That’s – I mean – You have class Wednesday. We’d only have one night for a twelve-hour drive, there and back.”

“I’ve already emailed my teacher,” Jean said, calmly. He wasn’t going to back down. “I can’t be in class Wednesday because I have to leave the state for a sudden, family emergency. And you don’t have class until Thursday. We’d make it there this evening, and we’d leave Wednesday morning. That gives you a whole day.”

“I’m not going.” I shake my head at him, shrug and cross my shoulders. “I’m just not.”

“I booked a hotel room,” he said.

“I’m not going.”

“Eren,” he said, standing up now. He walked up to me, just to be closer, just so that I could see the look in his eyes. I wouldn’t win this fight. I’d already lost. I knew it the moment he brought it up, but I stared back at him with all I had.

“What?” 

He placed his hands on my shoulders. “You are never going to be ready.”

I softened at that, looked away from him. Couldn’t look him in the eyes.

“If you let yourself back out the first time, what’s stopping you from backing out next time?”

I closed my eyes for a second. “You booked a hotel room?”

He nodded.

“With what money, Jean?”

“I borrowed some, from my mom.”

I sighed, and felt myself crack. My teeth gritted together. “I…am…so mad at you.”

“We can fight in the car,” Jean said, and then he walked out of the room, into the bedroom. When I followed him, he’d already swung my closet door open, found my duffle bag, and started to fill it with clothes I’d given him, and one of his binders. 

Silently, I gathered my things and helped him pack. 

…

We didn’t fight in the car. Jean drove, because I couldn’t stop shaking. The longer we drove, it became less because of rage, and more because of how sick to my stomach I was about this. We’d stopped to get coffee about ten miles back, and Jean had drunk all of his already. I still held mine in my hands, trying not to spill any of it through the hole in the lid. 

“We can’t just show up at my mom’s house,” I was saying. 

Jean must have been able to sense that I was strategizing now, not protesting, because he said, “Then what should we do?”

I cleared my throat. “I don’t know. I keep picturing us meeting somewhere.”

“You’d have to call her again.” 

I stared out my window for several minutes. Jean looked over at me twice, but didn’t bother me. I was thinking, and I’d like to think that he could tell. And I’d like to think that he was purposely trying not to push me anymore than he already had. He’d been doing subtle little things, ever since we got in the car, to apologize to me in his own way. Offering to drive, offering to let me sleep, offering to stay quiet so that I could read the book I brought, letting me pick the music, stroking my thigh, etc. He even avoided talking to me about what we were actually doing for the first hour or so, letting me get used to the idea. 

“Not necessarily,” I finally said. “Not if I called my sister and told her to tell my mom where to meet.”

“Mikasa,” Jean said, as if trying out the taste of it. “You wrote about her in your journals. You’ve never brought her up before, though.”

I looked out the window again. Took another sip of my coffee. “She never felt like my sister.”

“She was your best friend,” he said, quoting something he must have read in my journals.

“Kind of my only friend, really. Except Armin. But I didn’t meet him until I was older.”

Jean nodded. “Do you have any way to contact your sister?”

“I have a cellphone number. Don’t know if it’s still hers. But…I’m sure I could message her on Facebook if I needed to.”

Jean raised his eyebrows and let out a low whistle. I nodded, so that he would know I was shocked too. I really had completely torn myself apart from them. 

…

It felt like ten years had passed when we finally drove into San Antonio, a half-hour’s distance from the house I grew up in. Jean pulled into the parking lot of the hotel he booked. It looked rundown enough to be cheap. Inside, I confronted the desk and Jean sat on a nearby bench, unwilling to be eyed up and down without his binder on by a stranger. From where he sat, the attendant wouldn’t get a good enough look at him to be able to discern whether or not he had breasts. 

The attendant glanced at Jean, then at me. “The double doesn’t cost much more, if you want to be comfortable,” he said.

I realized that he wasn’t being a homophobic asshole. He honestly thought we were two broke guys who had chosen to sleep in the same bed for a night rather than pay the extra twenty dollars for a room with two beds.

I shook my head. “The single is fine.”

He glanced at Jean again, clearly confused by his appearance. “Well…okay, then.”

I snatched the key cards off the desk and booked it out of the lobby as soon as I was done paying. I wondered how much worse it would be for Jean and I down here. That was nothing, just then. Mild confusion and concern, which was the norm where we lived, would be the best case scenario down here. I wondered how he would have treated us if we weren’t literally giving him money. I wondered how nosy the maids would be tonight.

Jean followed me down the hall to our room. Inside was the bare minimum. A dresser with a TV sitting on it. A bed with two single pillows. A lamp, a chair, a desk, and a small coffee machine on the desk. But nonetheless, I couldn’t help feeling a little excited. I’d never stayed in a hotel with a significant other before. Had never even come close to the kind of romantic-hotel intimacy I heard about from married couples returning from their honeymoons. 

I pulled Jean into me by his waist once he shut the door behind us. He dropped our suitcase to rest his hands on my shoulders. I kissed him slowly, in the dark.

“Thank you,” I finally said, “for making this happen.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said, seriously. 

I looked into his eyes. He placed his hands on either side of my face and stroked my cheekbones. His gaze was overwhelming. I hadn’t been looked at like this since I woke up from a nightmare when I was five so horrifying that I screamed. My mom had pulled me into her and placed her hands on my cheeks just like Jean did now, and stared into my eyes just as fiercely so that I would know more than ever that I was safe, that I wasn’t alone in this, and that she wouldn’t let anything hurt me.

I blinked too much, in fear that I would start crying.

“It’s late,” Jean said, even though it was barely past dinner time. “Want to contact your sister tomorrow morning?”

I swallowed. I almost told him that I’d just get it over with, since I wouldn’t have to call her. After all, I’d talked to my sister once or twice since I moved away. Only when she contacted me first, only online, and only vaguely about what I was doing and how I was and why I wasn’t talking to mom. 

But then it occurred to me that Jean wasn’t suggesting I put it off for just any reason. He hadn’t put off this trip or the twelve-hour drive, had he?

He just wanted me to himself for a few hours.

And now that I thought about it, that was what I wanted too. 

“Yeah,” I said. “First thing.” 

He kissed me again, pulling me toward the bed. I let him guide me, and undress me, and take control. He eased me onto my back on the bed, and trailed his hand down my side and along my thigh. Then hitched one of my legs up. His thumb stroked my knee like it had my cheek.

“Just you, okay?” he asked.

I furrowed my eyebrows and propped myself up on my elbows to face him. “Why?”

He looked away from me. “I don’t want anyone to hear me.”

I shook my head. “Come on, Jean. Just – Can’t you just –”

I couldn’t see his face but I felt his glare. “You know I can’t.”

I sighed. Slumped back into the sheets. 

Jean, taking this as me giving into defeat, began mouthing up the side of my thigh. I breathed deeply. When his thumb started circling my clit my breath hitched and my hips lifted off the bed an inch. It didn’t matter that we’d been having sex constantly since the first time. Every time felt like too much, like it would finally be the time I’d have to ask him to stop because I just couldn’t physically endure it. But every time I started to get restless, started to slur my words, he’d pin my hips down with one hand and lace my fingers with his on the other, supporting me, but also refusing to back down. I had never been with someone so committed to my body. My skin felt like a livewire whenever he went down on me.

He started using his tongue and I curled my toes in the sheets, arched my back, and crossed my arms behind my head, groaning deeply. 

And to my surprise, Jean pulled away. I snapped my head up to see why, and realized he was adjusting his own position, getting on his knees and reaching back to touch himself before he returned his tongue to my lips. 

I watched for several minutes, unable to tear my eyes away. As far as I knew, this was the first time he’d ever ventured to do that. 

“Jean?” I said, and he looked up at me.

“Sorry,” he said, instantly knowing what I was thinking. “Just can’t help it when you’re being so fucking sexy.”

“But…” I said, “I mean, you can jerk off and be quiet?”

He shrugged. “Kind of. My mouth’s busy.”

As soon as he said it, we knew what we were going to do, and immediately leapt into different positions. Me, further down the bed on my back, and he above me, facing the other direction. He spread his legs, straddling my head, and eased his lips down onto my mouth. I moaned at the sight alone, and then I felt his tongue again. I didn’t make him wait a second longer – couldn’t resist. 

I hugged his waist to my chest. He wasn’t making any noise but I could feel how I was making him feel through his body. He was tense. His body shook on top of me. His feet dug into the mattress above my head. His fingers sunk into my thighs. The closer I got him to coming, the more insistent his own mouth got on me, channeling his own pleasure to me. And he was _so_ wet.

It only made everything better. He had never made me feel this good before. I lifted my ass off the bed and he slid his hands underneath it. He started to suck on me and that, like always, did it. I let out a deep and thorough groan as my orgasm throbbed on my clit and my legs clamped against Jean’s ears. 

Then I felt his lips pulse. I spread his ass with both hands and pressed his clit against my tongue just in time for him to come on it. 

But like always, that was just the start for Jean. 

I started to pull away and he pressed against me in protest.

“Keep going, keep going,” he moaned against my thigh. 

“Baby, if I keep going you’re going to –”

“ _Please_ , Eren, please please, baby, please,” he begged.

I hesitated, knowing that he would get loud if I kept going, now that he couldn’t occupy his mouth with going down on me. But I wasn’t a strong enough man to turn him down, and besides, what could I say? I wanted to hear it.

So like always I kept going, the whole time turned on by this new position. He’d never sat on my face before and frankly it was easier on my neck and tongue and I wouldn’t give one shit if I died like this. I just laced my fingers behind my head, and let him ride my face for as long as he pleased.

And he did get loud. Much louder than he usually did. Moaning and cursing and saying my name, losing his voice near the end from overuse. He was loud enough for my body to start tingling again, and I resisted asking him to go down on me a second time. I wanted him to be in control still. I just wanted to make him come all night if I could. But as it turned out, he only had three in him tonight.

When he finally eased himself off of me, I gaped at the hotel ceiling in awe for several minutes while he recovered next to me, panting and threading his fingers through his hair.

“Okay,” I said, “We are _always_ doing it like that from now on.”

He sat up and covered his face with both hands. “How loud was I?”

I opened my mouth to respond, when I processed the tone in his voice. I sat up slowly and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. He hugged his knees loosely to his chest.

“Who cares?” 

He rolled his eyes. “I do. It was bad, wasn’t it?”

“I doubt anyone heard.”

He shook his head. Scrubbed his hands down his face. Looked away from me. His eyes were glossy. He looked like he’d break. I felt an ache in my chest. For a long time before I started to transition, anything sexual, even by myself, was almost unbearable the second it was over. While it was happening, it was so easy to not care. And in that moment, all you wanted to do was not care. But the full force of it smacked you as soon as you came and it ruined everything. Made you hesitate the next time you wanted to get off.

And it hurt especially because we couldn’t just have sex and enjoy it like everyone else could. It had to be an ordeal. It had to be a process. He had to emotionally recover every time. Sure, sometimes it happened quickly and it was almost like he didn’t care anymore. But then there were times like this, when he wouldn’t even turn the light on after. His skin was clammy. My arm stuck to his back but he was shivering like he was cold.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” Jean whispered.

I held perfectly still. Thought before I spoke, which I never did. “What do you mean?”

“I just want to fuck like a normal fucking dude and not – not –”

“I know,” I whispered, and kissed his shoulder. I could sense that being held and kissed and comforted was the opposite of the masculine gratification he needed right now. But I couldn’t help it. I hated to see him in pain.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if – like I know I’m never going to have a dick. And so I’m never – going to be able to just fucking - _rail_ you like I want to.”

I blushed, because I was still a little turned on from sex a few minutes ago and I knew he wasn’t trying to dirty talk me now but it had the same effect. 

“And that’s…whatever. It’s easier to accept that because there’s nothing I can do about it. But…my voice – and then my fucking tits in my periphery all the goddamn time.” He covered his face again. Pressed his fingertips against his eyelids and rubbed. I could tell he was refusing to cry.

I swallowed. I should have stopped him after the first time he came, before he got too loud. 

He cried anyway and shoved the tears off his face right away. He cursed under his breath, frustrated with himself for looking weak, and that just made him cry harder. I held him for several minutes, feeling the same pain he felt expand in my chest, making my blood boil, and I thought I’d scream like a tea kettle if I didn’t do something about it now. I nudged him so that he would look at me.

“Hey,” I whispered. “As soon as we get back, I’ll make you an appointment with my doctor. Okay? She’ll…She won’t be able to do anything right away. But she’ll get you started.”

Jean shook his head. “My health insurance is shit.”

“Don’t worry about that right now,” I said.

He scoffed and pulled away from me. “Why, you gonna pay for it? You think your mom’s still gonna give you money for school once she finds out it’s never been for school? Once she finds out you’re funding your boyfriend’s transition with it?”

The venom in his voice physically shocked me and I jerked backward where I sat on the bed. His tone was so harsh and it hurt so bad to hear it that all I could do was stare at him, blankly, waiting for him to take it back.

But the look on his face right then made it clear that he knew it wouldn’t matter even if he did. He couldn’t unsay that. And I couldn’t forgive him for it.

“Eren,” he choked, after a long moment passed.

“Go fuck yourself, Jean.”

I got up, got dressed, grabbed my phone, wallet, and keys, and left the hotel room to head for the lobby. 

At the front desk, the attendant asked me if I decided I wanted a room with two beds after all. I shook my head. 

“I just want my own room.” 

…

In the morning, instinctively, I rolled over to reach for Jean. And when my hand didn’t immediately land on his waist my first assumption wasn’t that we fought and I wanted nothing to do with him, but that he went running.

Then it all felt fresh again. 

I sat up in bed and reached for my phone. It was earlier than I normally woke up. Almost as early as Jean woke up.

I wondered what he was doing right now. There was no way he was asleep. Maybe he went for a run, but I doubted it. He wouldn’t want any of the people in the adjoining rooms to catch a glimpse of him in a sports bra after last night.

I shook my head. Reminded myself that I didn’t care. Opened the messenger Facebook app on my phone.

I was still in Texas. Jean still drove me all the way down here to tell my mom. And besides, I was beginning to think like Jean. If I didn’t do it now, I never would.

I selected Mikasa. 

The whole drive down, I had been turning over all the possible ways to do this in my head. But now that I had my phone in my hand and could see my sister’s profile pic on the screen – she looked older, her hair was shorter, she seemed distant – it all seemed simple.

I typed:

 **Hey. I’m in town with my boyfriend. Want to meet?**

Seconds after I sent it, she responded.

**Is this a joke? You call Mom, hang up on her, and then ask to hang out like it’s no big deal?**

I considered apologizing. Decided she wouldn’t believe me if I did.

**I guess.**

It took her several minutes to reply.

**Where and when?**

We decided to meet at her place at ten, because it would be private and we might need a long time to talk. My mom would come over at noon. Mikasa didn’t ask me anything more about why I was here or who I was with or what the fuck happened to me. She knew to save it. She must have sensed that I wasn’t just turning up out of the blue. This had been a long time coming.

After I contacted her, everything with Jean seemed easier to dismiss. The bottom line was I loved him. He was having a hard time. And I was about to do one of the hardest things I’d ever have to do. The biggest fear I’d ever have to face. I needed him, he needed me. And even if I didn’t need him, I didn’t want to do this without him.

I sighed, and stood. I just hated being the one that said sorry first. Especially when I didn’t feel like I should have to.

But then, there was a knock at my door and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. I smiled despite myself. Then I wiped it off my face to answer the door.

Jean looked distraught. Like he hadn’t slept all night. He was sickly pale and his hair was greasy and mussed. His eyes flitted between my own and anywhere else.

“Eren,” he said, in the exact same tone he had last night. “I – Listen. You can stay mad – I mean, _of course_ you can stay mad. You _should_ be mad. I mean, I’m not like giving you permission – all I’m saying is that I don’t care if you’re mad. I mean, I do. Obviously. Because I’m so fucking sorry. And it doesn’t matter that I’m sorry, either, I get that. I just mean – what I’m trying to say is – even though I’m sorry and that doesn’t change anything, and I don’t have any right to ask you for anything – I just can’t – Just please don’t. Don’t leave, like that again. I can’t take it.”

It took him a long time to get everything out, and I let him, even though I fought the urge to cut him off and just pull him into my room and kiss him and tell him to forget about it. I let him because I could tell it mattered to him to actually apologize. He didn’t like to apologize any more than I did and so when he made up his mind to actually do it, he wasn’t going to let himself off the hook for anything. Even if I would have.

After he finished talking, we stood for a moment in silence and the panic he felt was palpable between us. But I placed my hand on his cheek and he sighed in relief and his lip quivered. He placed his hand over mine and stepped into the room. He pressed my back against the wall, and his forehead against my own.

“I really am so fucking sorry,” he said.

I didn’t tell him it was okay because I knew he wouldn’t ever let himself think it was.

So I just wrapped my arms around his waist and pulled him into a hug.

“I won’t ever say something like that again.”

I shook my head. “Don’t say that. You will. I will too. Shit happens.”

“Yeah, well, it shouldn’t. I shouldn’t have let it. Especially not now. Not when…”

“We’re meeting my sister at ten,” I said, swallowing. My throat felt like it was closing up. I curled my fingers in his shirt. I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted it to be too late to back out of it. I wanted Jean to pull me by my sleeve into the car and drive, so that I couldn’t get out of doing this unless I wanted to jump out of a moving car.

“Okay,” he said, and looked me in the eyes. “What do you want to do until then?”

I cleared my throat. I knew I couldn’t eat or sleep or watch TV. 

“I need to shower,” I said.

He nodded and combed his fingers through his hair, the same way he undoubtedly had been doing all night.

“Me too.”

“Let’s go,” I said, and laced my fingers in his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm guessing you see the reason why it has taken me so long to update now? I'm not trans and this story could not be more about being trans. This is something I'm coming to terms with, so that I can finish it for you, readers, but it is an uphill battle. I already feel guilty for ever claiming to be trans when I wasn't, for standing by a belief (the belief that if you say you're trans, you are) that I might not have the right to have anymore, and now for writing something I shouldn't write. 
> 
> I'm sorry, everyone, for taking so long. Hopefully it won't take this long a second time. And then once this is finished, I'll avoid writing trans narratives. I'll never not include trans characters. Representation matters, after all. But I just won't write about what it's like to be trans anymore, since that rightfully belongs to trans people. 
> 
> Thank you for understanding, to anyone that does.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're curious my tumblr URL is in-agony-and-ecstasy.tumblr.com and my writing-only blog is the-only-one-in-color.tumblr.com.


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